Live Blog: Donald Trump vs Hillary Clinton, Election Day and Results

Okay, I’ve been pondering how best to continue this blog’s coverage of the extraordinary US presidential election result and Donald Trump’s victory. I think the best thing to do is to shut down this particular live blog and open a new one, looking at the best way forward from here (from this blog’s own conservatarian perspective as well as from the Democrat vantage point), and looking at some of the best hot takes and best/worst reactions to the election result.

Thanks for following along with my coverage of election day (and night, and day again), and please do join me on the new live blog, starting now.

And yes, there will be a Trump Victory Catastrophisation Watch series…

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9 November – 2:55PM Washington D.C. / 7:55PM London

A glimmer of realisation from the Identity Politics Left?

There are signs that some people on the American Left are beginning to realise and tentatively suggest that years of hysterical demonising of conservatives and attempting to police the language and political discourse may have been overreach, and may have just backfired horribly by sweeping Donald Trump to victory.

Seth McFarlane, creator of Family Guy and former Bernie Sanders supporter, effectively admits that the Left have been cynically crying wolf far too often, effectively desensitising the American people to real instances of prejudice and bigotry:

“This will not be a popular observation, and I don’t even know if I subscribe to it myself,” he tweeted Wednesday following Trump’s White House win.

“But it can be argued that the Left expended so much energy over the last several years being outraged over verbal missteps, accidental innuendo, ‘tasteless’ tweets (see Justine Sacco) etc. in the name of clickbait, that when the real threat to equality emerged, we’d cried wolf too many times to be heard.”

I imagine that we will soon see a co-ordinated attack on Seth McFarlane and others who question the tactics of the Cult of Social Justice and Identity Politics, by the SJW cultists themselves. They will argue that the American Left should double down, shriek ever louder about identity, wallow even deeper in victimhood culture and preach to the choir.

There is shaping up to be quite a battle for the soul of the American Left. Will more left-wing Americans of principle dare to realise their side’s overreach and finally stand up to the illiberal, censorious identity politics cult, or will they fearfully avoid confrontation and doom the Democratic Party to another possible defeat in 2020?

If Trump’s presidency is to be remotely successful he will indeed have to hew closely to the spirit of his victory speech, and not revert to the thin-skinned egomaniac we have seen all too frequently during the campaign.

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9 November – 2:05PM Washington D.C. / 7:05PM London

Left-wing media in denial

And MSNBC is immediately failing to learn the lessons of the election result, fawning over one “undocumented” immigrant after another in their coverage as they lament the fact that rights and privileges to which they are not entitled may soon be potentially taken away by a Trump administration.

MSNBC is such a joke they're doing a story on how undocumented illegal aliens scared right now. So under Barack Obama/Clinton they weren't

Of course, they refer obstinately to “undocumented” rather than “illegal” immigrants, seemingly oblivious to the way in which their overt attempts to undermine the idea of borders and managed migration helped to fuel the huge popular backlash which consigned them to defeat and elected Donald Trump to the White House.

Donald Trump has promised his supporters the moon. Now he has to deliver.

I think it’s worth quoting from the email just sent by Donald Trump to his supporters:

They said we could never do it.

But last night you showed the world that America will once again be a country of, for, and by the PEOPLE.

You fought like a winner, you defied all odds, and history will forever remember the role you played in taking our country back.

[..] Last night we learned that America is still a beacon of hope where the impossible is possible.

For far too long, we’ve heard Washington politicians give the excuse that “it can’t be done.” They say we can’t balance the budget, we can’t stop corruption, we can’t control the border, we can’t bring jobs back to our country.

I REFUSE to accept that it can’t be done. This is the country that declared its independence, won two world wars, and landed a man on the moon. This is America. We can and we WILL get it done.

Now it’s time to start uniting our country and binding the wounds of our divided nation. I promise to be a president for ALL Americans. I will work for you. I will fight for you. And I will win for you.

You will soon remember what it’s like to win as an American.

Donald Trump is making some very grand promises – and setting incredibly high benchmarks – for his administration, by promising his supporters that they will soon taste victory against global forces that no other Western politician has yet managed to successfully tackle, and by promising a return to the confident, optimistic America which made extraordinary human achievement (like the moon landings) seem effortless and inevitable.

Lord knows that I hope beyond hope that the prosperity promised by Donald Trump is achieved, despite the fact that the candidate himself has given almost no indication as to how he will bring about this national renaissance. But Trump has left himself absolutely no margin for error here. He has essentially promised the equivalent of another moon landing, only without sketching out a new Apollo Program to make it happen. It is rapidly becoming crystal clear that a Trump presidency will stand or fall on the quality of the advisers and cabinet members with whom Trump chooses to surround himself.

And what we know so far about Trump’s thinking when it comes to cabinet members and senior aides is not encouraging.

He’s also expected to reward the band of surrogates who stood by him during the bruising presidential campaign, including Newt Gingrich, Rudy Giuliani and Chris Christie, all of whom are being considered for top posts. A handful of Republican politicians may also make the cut, including Sen. Bob Corker for secretary of state or Sen. Jeff Sessions for secretary of defense.

Trump’s divisive campaign may make it difficult for him to attract top talent, especially since so many politicians and wonks openly derided the president-elect over the past year. And Trump campaign officials have worried privately that they will have difficulty finding high-profile women to serve in his cabinet, according to a person familiar with the campaign’s internal discussions, given Trump’s past comments about women.

And considering that Trump is reportedly looking at people like Newt Gingrich (Secretary of State) and Rudy Giuliani (Attorney General), we are being asked to believe that a new American century can somehow be forged by some of the most familiar faces of the last century.

I’ll be honest – I have grave doubts that these dubious figures from America’s past will be able to drag the country successfully into the future.

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9 November – 11:45AM Washington D.C. / 4:45PM London

Hillary Clinton gives her concession speech

A long standing ovation for Clinton as she takes the stage, flanked by Bill and Chelsea.

“I hope that he will be a successful president for all Americans”, says Clinton of president-elect Donald Trump.

“Our campaign was never about one person or one election”, says the person whose campaign slogan was “I’m With Her”. Okay, then.

“Donald Trump is going to be our president. We owe him an open mind and the chance to lead. Our constitution enshrines the peaceful transfer of power and we cherish that”, says Clinton, before markedly underlining the freedoms of speech and worship enshrined in the Constitution.

Clinton is gracious to the Obamas too, saying “our nation owes you an enormous debt”. “We thank you for your graceful, determined leadership that has meant so much to many Americans and people across the world”.

For all her many real flaws, it is hard not to feel a pang of something as the Clinton era definitively comes to an end:

I'm crying. Poor woman, what a life. And she's been a part of all our lives for a quarter of a century. End of an era.

I maintain that America is more than ready for a woman president. This election result was absolutely not the repudiation of the idea of a woman president. It was a repudiation of Hillary Clinton, and Clinton alone. The glass ceiling will be broken.

"To all the little girls watching…never doubt that you are valuable and powerful & deserving of every chance & opportunity in the world."

“My friends, let us have faith in each other – let us not grow weary, let us not lose heart, for there are more seasons to come and more work to do”, says Clinton, quoting scripture as she closes her remarks.

Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Kaine has taken the stage in front of an audience of Clinton campaign workers, saying how proud he is of Hillary Clinton and noting that Clinton is on track to win the popular vote in this election, though obviously not the presidency itself.

“She has been in battles before where things didn’t go her way and she accepted it, and then woke up the next day and battled again”, says Kaine.

And he raises applause as he quotes William Faulkner: “They kilt us but they ain’t whupped us yit”.

It looks like Donald Trump will be the next president of the United States. I can’t say I’m rejoicing about his victory — though Hillary Clinton’s defeat is certainly welcome.

This is nothing short of an amazing achievement. I’m not sure one can exaggerate what a remarkable accomplishment this is, whether you’re a fan, foe, critic, or skeptic. My views on Trump are well known and I stand by them all. Except, of course, for my skepticism about his chances of winning. I was clearly wrong about that.

And, now that he will be the next president, I sincerely hope he continues to prove me wrong. We only have one president at a time and he deserves a shot, not because I think he’s worthy or deserving — but because the country is.

As a conservative writer and as someone who has been very critical of Trump from Day 1, I feel like I have zero ownership of a Trump presidency — which is quite liberating, actually. But as an American I have every bit as much ownership of his presidency as anyone. And for that reason alone, I hope I’m proven wrong about all of my deep seated concerns and fears.

But, as a conservative, I also hope Trump surprises me. I hope the Republican House and Senate (!), work to give him a positive conservative agenda. Likewise, I hope his cadre of campaign advisers and media boosters are successful at making sure that Trump actually governs as the competent conservative they promised he would be. I think they will have their work cut out for them but they, too, deserve their shot. Indeed, they are the ones who “own this” now.

We all remember the touching note left for incoming president Bill Clinton by the outgoing George H W Bush, wishing him well and pledging to support and pray for him, despite their political differences (and the fact that Clinton had consigned him to a one-term presidency).

It is hard to utter the same support for Donald Trump because of his known character flaws, the things he has said on the campaign trail and the policies that he has advocated. But for America’s sake, we must all hope that a Trump presidency is either successful against all the odds, or else mercifully short.

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9 November – 11:30AM Washington D.C. / 4:30PM London

Supreme relief

Rod Dreher articulates the thought foremost in the minds of many conservatives who had no love or respect for Donald Trump, but who feared the potential impact of a Clinton presidency on the judiciary:

A Republican president. A Republican Senate. The Supreme Court will be safe for a while. That is the best news of the night.

“We do remain a sharply divided country”, he acknowledges, and then talks about the need to heal the divisions of a long campaign. “This needs to be a time of redemption, not a time of recrimination”.

One can imagine how different Paul Ryan’s speech might have been had Trump led the party to defeat, as many expected to happen. But Ryan clearly sees the way that the wind is blowing. If he does intend to be the statesmanlike legislative check and balance on Donald Trump’s whims and flights of fancy, he is giving no hint of it now.

If Trump wins, the recriminations against Clinton and her team will be brutal. The idea that she could be the first woman president will be seen as a mass delusion, a grand, party-wide exercise in willful denial. Democrats are now given to softly worrying that “she’s just not as good a retail politician as her husband was.” The more honest truth would come out after a November loss: Her instincts are terrible. She plays it safe with focus-grouped pabulum and offers implausible lies when people call her on it. Her record as secretary of state offered no reason for inspiration or confidence. When faced with a garish, absurd opponent who generated broad, bipartisan fear, she offered only the soggy mush of the status quo. Democrats are trying to make themselves love her now; they’ll hate her if she loses.

And Geraghty is equally unsparing when it comes to the consequences for President Obama’s legacy:

How successful can Obama’s two terms be if Americans were willing to take a chance on an outsider who stands for everything he abhors? Obama took office optimistic despite the Great Recession he inherited. How would it look if eight years later he left the office to Trump, who has risen on the strength of a despairing, angry, bitterly divided electorate eager to “burn it down”?

It would look like Obama left Americans with so little respect for the office of the presidency that they thought Trump could do the job.

After a Trump win, Democratic recriminations about Obama would flourish as well. His presidency would have been the story of the party’s slow, steady, painful fall from the heights of power to the depths of defeat.

One wonders what on earth President Obama will say when he gives his speech later.

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9 November – 11:05AM Washington D.C. / 4:05PM London

Jim Geraghty of National Review seems to concur with the left-wing / identity politics overreach theory:

Back in August, I offered the counter-intuitive theory that the Right was winning the culture wars in 2016, that the hard Left had bitten off way more than it can chew and was crumbling before a backlash: transgender bathrooms, celebrating Catilyn Jenner and policing the pronouns people use, college alumni donations down, the end of Gawker… now we can add in a giant, sweeping victory for Republicans of all stripes to the list.

It is still early days, but I think we can safely say that this phenomena – the identity politics backlash – is a significant part of the Trump victory.

Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt is currently offering some of the best early analysis – and warnings – about the astonishing Hillary Clinton defeat. As he has consistently offered robust commentary on the social justice and identity politics crazes sweeping college campuses, so he is worth following while we digest these presidential election results.

First in this tweet:

How did this happen? Re-watch Clinton's first campaign video. Which demographic group was largely ignored? https://t.co/n13l0a6Me0

One can already hear it – the opening chorus in the howl of outrage from incandescent Democrats who expected to romp home to victory last night, and who now find themselves and their worldview summarily rejected by the nation. The temptation to lash out undiscriminatingly at all Trump voters, suggesting that they voted for Donald Trump as a positive affirmation of his worst traits and behaviours, will be strong. Check Twitter – many are already giving way to this temptation.

But this will only feed the monster. Calling Trump supporters “deplorable” and accusing them all of endorsing Trump’s questionable behaviour toward women and minorities with their vote will only lead the half of the country who voted Trump to feel even more misunderstood and under attack. It will harden Trump’s support. And no matter how cathartic it may feel for SJWs today, to suffer and roar on Twitter about the supposed inhumanity of their fellow Americans, in the longer term they only set the stage for another presently unimaginable defeat in 2020.

The American Left may never bring themselves to like the half of the country which supported Donald Trump. But for their own sake, they must stop actively hating them.

We are witnessing the power of a massive populist movement that has now upended the two most stable democracies in the world — and thrown both countries into a completely unknown future. In Britain, where the polls did not pick up the latent support for withdrawal from the European Union, a new prime minister is now navigating a new social contract with the indigenous middle and working classes forged by fear of immigration and globalization. In the U.S., the movement — built on anti-political politics, economic disruption, and anti-immigration fears — had something else, far more lethal, in its bag of tricks: a supremely talented demagogue who created an authoritarian cult with unapologetically neo-fascist rhetoric. Britain is reeling toward a slow economic slide. America has now jumped off a constitutional cliff. It will never be the same country again. Like Brexit, this changes the core nature of this country permanently.

This is now Trump’s America. He controls everything from here on forward. He has won this campaign in such a decisive fashion that he owes no one anything. He has destroyed the GOP and remade it in his image. He has humiliated the elites and the elite media. He has embarrassed every pollster and naysayer. He has avenged Obama. And in the coming weeks, Trump will not likely be content to bask in vindication. He will seek unforgiving revenge on those who dared to oppose him. The party apparatus will be remade in his image. The House and Senate will fail to resist anything he proposes — and those who speak up will be primaried into oblivion. The Supreme Court may well be shifted to the far right for more than a generation to come — with this massive victory, he can pick a new Supreme Court justice who will make Antonin Scalia seem like a milquetoast. He will have a docile, fawning Congress for at least four years. We will not have an administration so much as a court.

Oh, get over yourself with your contempt for Brexit, Andrew. Quite rightly you would never expect America to subsume herself into a supranational political union of the Americas, yet you think that this democracy-leeching status quo is just fine for your country of birth? This is the lazy, instinctively pro-EU commentary of somebody who has not been paying attention, who has half forgotten his conservative principles and who has nothing worthwhile to say.

That being said, I do share many of Andrew’s concerns about Trump’s strong authoritarian tendencies. They are real and pronounced, and no matter how much Trump may cosmetically pivot away from his more extreme rhetoric, will need resisting:

I see no way to stop this at first, but some of us will have to try. And what we must seek to preserve are the core institutions that he may threaten — the courts, first of all, even if he shifts the Supreme Court to an unprecedentedly authoritarian-friendly one. Then the laws governing the rules of war, so that war crimes do not define America as their disavowal once did. Then the free press, which he will do all he can to intimidate and, if possible, bankrupt. Then the institutions he will have to destroy to achieve what he wants — an independent Department of Justice as one critical bulwark, what’s left of the FBI that will not be an instrument of his reign of revenge, our scientific institutions, and what’s left of free thought in our colleges and universities. We will need to march peacefully on the streets to face down the massive intimidation he will at times present to a truly free and open society. We have to hold our heads up high as we defend the values of the old republic, even as it crumbles into authoritarian dust. We must be prepared for nonviolent civil disobedience. We must transcend racial and religious division in a movement of resistance that is as diverse and as open as the new president’s will be uniform and closed.

And, impossible though it may be, we will have to resist partisanship. The only way back to a free society, to a country where no one need fear the president’s wrath or impulses, is to unwind the factionalism that has helped destroy this country. We have to forge a new coalition on right and left to resist fascism’s reach and cultic power. In a country which just elected and re-elected a black president — whose grace feels now almost painful to recall — it is surely possible.

Andrew Sullivan himself admits that he is emotional and prone to hyperbole in the heat of the moment. I think that many of us are probably feeling the strain at the moment. But the Republic has not “repealed itself”, as Sullivan claims. The US Constitution was crafted specifically for moment such as these.

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9 November – 10:00AM Washington D.C. / 3:00PM London

And we’re back. I’ll be reviewing some of the most interesting reaction to this stunning US presidential election result, reviewing Clinton’s upcoming concession speech and then giving my hot take on the result.

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9 November – 2:57AM Washington D.C. / 7:57AM London

“To be really historic, we have to do a great job, and I promise not to let you down” says Trump. “Hopefully at the end of two years or four years – or maybe even eight years – you will say that this was something you were very proud to do. And I can only say that while the campaign is over, our work – or rather this movement – is only just beginning”.

And Trump closes, stating “I love this country”.

Well. This is all entirely shocking and unexpected (to me). Donald Trump, president-elect of the United States. Yikes.

I’m going to take a brief break to recharge. The live blog will continue in due course – stay tuned.

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9 November – 2:57AM Washington D.C. / 7:57AM London

“We must dream big and bold and daring”, says Trump.

I don’t want to like this speech. I am sceptical of most of the content. But I do like the faint Lincolnian and now Ted Rooseveltian allusions in the early part of Donald Trump’s victory speech – the latter to Roosevelt’s “dare mighty things”.

If only I had any confidence that these words might actually be backed by a Lincolnian resolve or a Rooseveltian character.

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9 November – 2:55AM Washington D.C. / 7:55AM London

“I’ve spent my entire life in business looking at the untapped potential in people and projects around the world”, says Trump. “It’s going to be a beautiful thing”.

“The forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer”, says Trump, pledging to rebuild infrastructure and make it “second to none”, before going on to praise veterans and promise them greater support.

“We will double our growth and have the strongest economy anywhere in the world”, he continues. Really? How?

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9 November – 2:53AM Washington D.C. / 7:53AM London

Donald Trump takes the stage

“Sorry to keep you waiting – complicated business”, Trump jokes as he takes in the applause and says the unimaginable words “I just received a call from Secretary Clinton. She congratulated us – us – on our victory, and I congratulated her and her family on their campaign, they fought very hard”.

And HERE is the belated Trump pivot – “We owe her a major debt of gratitude for her service to our country”.

And a nice Lincolnian reference to “bind[ing] the wounds” of the nation.

“I’m reaching out to you for your guidance and your help, so that we can work together to unify our great country”, Trump says. “Ours ways not a campaign, but an incredible and great movement”.

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9 November – 2:47AM Washington D.C. / 7:47AM London

Mike Pence addresses Trump supporters

Mike Pence has now taken the stage to address Trump supporters at their victory rally. “The American people have spoken, and the American people have elected their new champion”, Pence declares.

The crowd respond with chants of “USA!”

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9 November – 2:41AM Washington D.C. / 7:41AM London

Hillary Clinton concedes

Dana Bash of CNN confirms that Hillary Clinton has apparently now called Donald Trump to concede the 2016 presidential election.

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9 November – 2:29AM Washington D.C. / 7:29AM London

Hillary refuses to concede tonight

It is quite remarkable, really, that rather than staying up to await the final result – with Trump so close to victory, needing only Michigan or Pennsylvania to make it to 270 electoral votes – Hillary Clinton chose not to concede, not to address her supporters but rather to send her campaign chairman, John Podesta, out to utter a few vague platitudes before sending the crowd home for the night.

The Clinton campaign is being rightly (I think) roasted for this decision on the television news – at least on CNN, where I am currently watching. One can imagine the howls of outrage from Democrats were the situation reversed and Donald Trump refused to emerge at the appropriate time.

One can understand the shock at this apparently unexpected reversal of fortune, but there is a nation out there waiting for reassurance. When everyone predicted that Trump might refuse to concede defeat, we rightly heard a lot about the importance of smooth and peaceful transitions. In light of those pronouncements, the Clinton / Podesta decision tonight looks churlish, not to mention hypocritical.

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9 November – 2:23AM Washington D.C. / 7:23AM London

The Democrats and their dangerous contempt for the white working classes

Janet Daley has an excellent piece in the Telegraph, excoriating the Democrats and the metropolitan American Left in general for not only giving up on speaking to or representing the white working class, but often treating them and their priorities with open contempt:

The white working class voter no longer sees the Democratic party as his natural home. This has enormous political and social consequences. And there is an open question whether this election could bring about a permanent shift in party loyalty, much as Barry Goldwater did in turning the southern states Republican. There are clear indications that Hillary overplayed the woman card, failed to make any real gesture to those who had been famously “left behind” by the global economy and took far too much for granted.

[..] The Democrats are urgently in need of an epiphany: the message they are sending does not reflect the voice of their traditional constituency. They are not talking the language of blue collar Americans: they speak Left-liberal claptrap which engages their cosmopolitan friends. But there are not enough of them to create a national mandate.

You may notice the parallel with our own dear Labour party. The Left has lost its centre of gravity and its historical identity. But if Trump really pulls this off, we will have more to worry about than the chatter of Left-wing society.

The West will have lost the leadership of the one remaining superpower in the world. The globalisation of labour which has served the wealthy so well – and the bitterness that it has generated among indigenous populations – will have altered the international power balance for a generation. All of the assumptions about military alliances, free trade and global cooperation will come into question. The future is seriously alarming. And not just for Americans.

And all because of selfishness – because the establishment was determined to hang on to policies which benefited themselves without bringing the rest of the country with them, or ensuring that other, less well-connected people were also getting a fair deal.

My Conservatives for Liberty colleague Paul Nizinskyj, currently in the thick of the action in Washington D.C., makes a similar observation:

The guys on CNN are already reacting with complete surprise at districts which were expected to come out for Hillary which have come out for Trump. What I’ve been warning Americans my entire time here appears to be happening; the Trump campaign appears to be bringing out people who do not usually vote.

This is exactly what happened during the Brexit vote and is exactly what the Canadian Tories did to win a surprise majority some years ago. There is an anti-majority mood in the country, which has galvanised citizens which never usually vote.

I and other British conservatives have reasons to fear a Trump presidency, but if it happens, the message must be clear; this would have happened because politics as usual has neglected the common man for so long, the Republican Party has degenerated to such a degree, that people grasp for extremes.

Whether Trump wins or Trump loses, there will follow a period of reflection for the Republican Party from tomorrow, to decide just what it has done wrong over the last decade to lead to this point. I only hope people of the same ilk as Conservatives for Liberty are part of that process.

If there is now to be a period of instability, the turbulence is largely due to the fact that establishment politicians of both main political parties in America preferred to sit and jealously guard their treasures rather than listen to the often-legitimate concerns of people less fortunate than themselves.

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9 November – 1:47AM Washington D.C. / 6:47AM London

Mike Cernovich, take a bow

If you don’t know who Mike Cernovich is, then you need to find out pretty darn quickly. Because it is insurgent, guerilla online activism like that practised by Cernovich which did so much to drive online discussion of the presidential campaign, push Trump-friendly memes and topics into the public discourse and ultimately help secure what looks to be an historic and otherwise unexpected Trump victory.

There was a time, not so long ago, when reasonable people all across America believed that Donald Trump was a fake presidential candidate. The guy was a novelty act, we thought—a narcissistic dingbat who was going through the motions of running a political campaign in service of nothing more sinister or consequential than promoting his big dumb brand.

That turned out to be an incorrect assessment. At some point it became clear that Trump was a narcissistic dingbat who was also possibly going to be president.

As many of us continue to grapple with the depth of how wrong we were to dismiss Trump in the opening months of his campaign, it’s worth looking back at the handful of individuals who declined to join our giddy chorus of skepticism. While the rest of us giggled like idiots, or else reasoned our way to being convinced that a Trump nomination could never happen, these commentators saw something in Trump that made them confident he had what it took.

The article says of Cernovich:

What tipped him off: “I knew Trump would do well because I read his books and had only watched a couple of episodes of The Apprentice over 10 years ago,” Cernovich said in an email. “I didn’t have the same biases on Trump that others had. I read his books and saw a man who had a strong mindset, a track record of succeeding, and who would make strong and sometimes offensive comments as a way to get media attention.”

He went on: “Culturally, people were tired of politically correct culture. We live in an age of micro aggressions where people are deemed racist or sexist of phobic for making one wrong tweet. There will always be a counter-culture, and Trump, with his take no prisoners style of commentary, is that counter-culture.”

Also: “Trump … has the ‘strong father’ masculine energy. Consider how his family members all live (opulent wealth aside) normal lives. They have families. The children and grandchildren have avoided the Kim Kardashian style drama common these days. Trump must’ve been an extraordinary father to have raised well-adjusted kids.”

What he says now: “I received a lot of hate and doubt when backing Trump. I’m used to that, though, as I prefer taking contrarian positions. …. It feels great to be vindicated, especially because most of Trump’s doubters were snide.”

I agree with Mike Cernovich on some issues and probably disagree with him on many more (particularly where he veers into conspiracy theories), but anyone who has watched one of his Periscope videos will attest to the sense of purpose and excitement his recent political activism has generated among many of his followers.

Cernovich was also probably prescient when he slapped down mainstream media predictions that Trump was only in the race to generate interest in a future cable news channel, or Trump News Network. As Cernovich pointed out then – and as was immediately apparent to anyone trying to decide how to watch and read the election unfold tonight – the old monopoly of the television news (and the grip that their narrative held over the public understanding of politics) has been broken for good.

One can argue whether it is good for presidential candidates to have their own cable news-style Facebook Live events, with anchors and talking heads all in the pay of the politician they are covering – and I think it is a pretty terrible way to go – but we are likely to see much more of this in future.

If Donald Trump does prevail tonight and becomes president – and if he survives his four year term without resigning or being impeached – then it is a fairly safe bet that his angry Democratic challenger in 2020 will be using many of the same insurgent techniques as used with such devastating effect by the Donald Trump campaign and his most effective cheerleaders.

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9 November – 1:18AM Washington D.C. / 6:18AM London

Free riders beware

The chancellories of Europe may rightly be waking up in a cold sweat this morning at the realisation that the decades-old agreement – in which America bore the burden of militarily defending the West while European countries frittered money on their generous social welfare programmes – may be about to come to an abrupt end:

Good thing successive postwar European governments didn't underfund their armed forces and free ride on US military spending, huh

Penned a week before the election, John Daniel Davidson at The Federalist explains the allure of Donald Trump’s muscular, confrontational (and one might add regressive) protectionist stance on trade, through the prism of Pennsylvania – a state which looks about ready to declare for Trump:

For much of the twentieth century, Pennsylvania was America’s poster child for industrial prosperity, from its massive steel mills around Pittsburgh to its anthracite coal mines in the northeast. From Bethlehem to Braddock to Scranton, middle-class communities were often built on the foundation of single industries (or even a single company), and ever since the New Deal and the organization of powerful labor unions, the workers in those industries invariably voted Democratic.

Allegiance to the Democratic Party was tied, for the most part, to trade policies that protected Pennsylvania’s twin economic engines: steel and coal. When Pennsylvania steel producers began feeling pressure from new technologies and overseas competition in the decades after World War Two, the industry pushed for, and got, tariffs and import quotas. Government contracts—many of them secured with the help of Rep. John Murtha, who died in 2010 after 36 years in Congress—helped stem the loss of jobs. Generations of steelworkers and miners across the state had grown accustomed to middle-class wages, generous health and retirement benefits, and the promise of protection in all its forms.

Then it all came crashing down. Beginning in the 1970s and continuing to the present day, the steady loss of mining jobs and the dramatic closure of steel mills across Pennsylvania struck a blow to vast swaths of the state, hollowing out communities and leaving former middle-class workers dependent on welfare and unemployment benefits.

[..] Across the state, Democratic-majority counties are turning to Trump and his promise of protectionist trade policies. One recent statewide poll found Clinton ahead by just two points statewide, but Trump with a nine-point lead in Pittsburgh and a twelve-point lead in Wilkes-Barre, the seat of Luzerne County. In 2012, Obama easily won both Pittsburgh and Luzerne County. Ron Ferrance, the GOP chairman of Luzerne County, says Democrats have lost their hold on northeast Pennsylvania. “I think this area is done with them. They’re played out,” he says, predicting Trump will win Pennsylvania by double digits.

The Democrats – really, the entire American political establishment – ignored these suffering Americans at their peril. And now, it seems, they will suffer the consequences.

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9 November – 12:50AM Washington D.C. / 5:50AM London

Watching some hand-wringing leftist on CNN moan about his pain right now makes me think that however much Democrats and large-L liberals may be hurting as they face possible defeat, it is worth remembering that many of Donald Trump’s supporters have known nothing but defeat and betrayal by the politicians who promised to fight for them, in many cases going back decades.

I write this as somebody who passionately does not want Donald Trump to win, but who recognises that many of those who voted for him were in no way endorsing his dubious prior behaviour or the worst aspects of his personality, but simply saw in Trump somebody who might not lead them on the usual merry dance.

Sadly I believe that they were wrong to put their faith in Trump. And if he is indeed elected president, as now seems likely, Donald Trump will have an immense job to live up to the many glib promises that he has made.

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9 November – 12:45AM Washington D.C. / 5:45AM London

Are we witnessing an anti-Social Justice backlash?

Robby Soave of the Daily Beast suggests that we are witnessing a massive backlash and reaction against the Cult of Social Justice and Identity Politics which has captured swathes of the American Left:

I warned you that over-the-top campus-style political correctness was going to inspire a terrifying counter-revolution. You didn't listen.

Can we lay the blame for a possible Hillary Clinton defeat at the hands of identity politics? No, that would be too simplistic. But it is certainly part of the tapestry, a thread running through the rope with which the white working class and assorted conservatives are threatening to hang the Democrats.

If you demonise and persecute swathes of people for the relatively moderate beliefs that they hold or language that they use, as the Social Justice Warriors live to do, it will inspire resentment. Incredible resentment, in some cases. This is certainly part of what we are now witnessing. As to how big a factor an anti-SJW backlash may be, that will have to be picked over in the coming days and weeks.

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8 November – 11:46PM Washington D.C. / 9 November – 4:46AM London

Maybe some of those people who acted as though a President Mitt Romney would be the Worst Thing Ever four years ago might now want to reconsider their standard hyperbolic reaction to standard, moderate, dyed-in-the-wool conservatives.

I quite agree with Ed West here:

so little self-reflection from ppl who caused this. makes me sad how ruthlessly US media tore apart a gentleman like Mitt. they deserve this

Hillary Clinton’s reeling campaign is now hinging on three predominantly white industrial states that were never supposed to be in play.

Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin – and their combined 46 electoral votes – appear to be the last bastion of hope for her candidacy, after Florida, North Carolina and Ohio were called for Donald Trump.

None of the three have voted for Republicans since 1988, and all appeared until the final days of the campaign to be safely in Clinton’s column. Yet as the clock ticked past 11 p.m. on the East Coast, Trump led narrowly in Michigan and Wisconsin, and Clinton clung to a thin in Pennsylvania.

“All eyes on Michigan,” tweeted former Congressman John Dingell, as Clinton’s path to the presidency narrowed dramatically as the evening wore on.

Trump spent the waning days of the campaign barnstorming Michigan. He, his running mate Mike Pence and top surrogates like Sarah Palin hit crucial cities in the state in the final days, considered a last ditch attempt to salvage his candidacy. Instead, it appears that it was Clinton’s campaign that was triaging when she, Bill Clinton and President Barack Obama made last-minute stops there. With more than half of ballots counted in the state, Trump led by 24,000 votes.

With this ominous note:

There were warning signs that Clinton was weak in both Michigan and Wisconsin. She lost the primary in both to Democratic rival Bernie Sanders and rarely campaigned in either state since.

Signs which the Clinton campaign apparently ignored.

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8 November – 11:05PM Washington D.C. / 9 November – 4:05AM London

Apparently Clinton aides (and many people on Twitter) are chalking up Hillary Clinton’s sudden lurch in fortunes almost exclusively to FBI director James Comey’s decision to re-open the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email scandal:

This is ludicrous. I’ll grant a waiver for a day or so, just because tonight’s events must be a huge shock to the systems of many Democrats, and people say silly things when they are emotional. But if this is indeed to be a Clinton defeat, to chalk it all up to the actions of the FBI – as though Hillary Clinton’s email scandal were not already largely priced in to the public’s estimation of her – is a case of massive denial.

If Trump goes on to win, it will be a thorough and unprecedented repudiation of Clinton and the opinions of much of the establishment. To begin by blaming it all on the Bad Man at the FBI is to dodge the work of coming to terms with the defeat.

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8 November – 10:55PM Washington D.C. / 9 November – 3:55AM London

Did Ronald Brownstein predict the strategic error which has led Hillary Clinton to this excruciatingly difficult place in an article written less than one week ago?

Hillary Clinton’s easiest path to an Electoral College majority does not include Ohio, Florida, or North Carolina.

Yet those three states all rank at the very top of the list of locales where she has invested the most time and advertising spending, especially in the campaign’s critical closing weeks. By contrast, the campaign has devoted very little advertising or time from Clinton and her top surrogates in several of the states that are part of her core strategy for reaching 270 Electoral College votes—among them Michigan, Wisconsin, Colorado, Virginia, and New Mexico.

The Clinton team’s decision to focus so much more attention on states that it wants to win—as opposed to those it believes it needs to win—represents one of the central, if often unremarked upon, choices of the 2016 election. It has allowed her to play offense for most of the general election, while forcing rival Donald Trump to spend most of his energy defending states more indispensable to his strategy than to hers.

But it’s also meant Clinton has devoted little attention, beyond field organizing, to fortifying states where Trump is now making a late push amid the tailwind of tightening national polls. With Trump consolidating traditional Republican voters, Clinton faces the risk that she has overestimated her hold on the places most central to her strategy.

My emphasis in bold.

This certainly seems plausible. And if Hillary Clinton goes on to lose the election – the New York Times prediction is now hovering at 94% probability of a Trump victory – it will prove to be one of the most grave strategic errors ever made in American presidential politics.

Top Democrats here at Hillary Clinton’s election-night party are still projecting confidence, but there’s clearly concern as her path to the presidency narrows.

“It’s tight, but we still have a lot of the country left to come in,” Representative Steve Israel, a Clinton ally in New York, told me. “We knew from the beginning that Donald Trump had to win Florida to stay alive. We have other places to go, but I’m confident that we’re in very strong shape.”

On the stage, Senator Charles Schumer tried to rally the crowd with a chant borrowed from the Naval Academy Prep School, by way of fans of the U.S. men’s national soccer team. “I believe that she will win! I believe that she will win!” Schumer shouted. Yet he did not repeat the prediction of New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio in assuming a Clinton victory. Schumer, who won reelection to his Senate seat easily, is poised to become the Democratic leader with the retirement of Nevada’s Harry Reid. But with key Senate seats now favoring Republicans, he is not likely to become majority leader.

Among the crowd, many partygoers had retreated to the food court in anticipation of a long night.

Even as he held out optimism for a Clinton win, Israel began to consider the implications of just how close the race had become and how much stronger Trump had performed than Democrats expected. “This election was not about the candidates,” Israel said. “It was about the time that we’re in. Donald Trump could never have run in any time other than the time we’re in right now. We’re witnessing a new convergence of pressures on the American public. The economy is changing radically. They’ve lost faith in institutions, in government, in sports, and in Wall Street. They feel threatened at home. You put it all together, and you have a very anxious environment that Donald Trump has tapped into.”

Make that 87%. His odds are increasing faster than I can post updates on this blog.

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8 November – 10:26PM Washington D.C. / 9 November – 3:26AM London

This is frankly astonishing. As Rod Dreher points out, even if Donald Trump does go on to lose tonight, the fact that he has fought the election this close after all the predictions of his defeat means that Trumpism now will not die with the defeat of the candidate.

Even if he loses tonight, this is Trump's GOP now, completely. New day in America.

To repeat (again), Donald Trump is not like “Brexit plus plus plus”, as he loves to claim. But that feeling of shock and history in the making in the pit of my stomach right now is exactly the same as I felt on the night of the EU referendum.

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8 November – 10:12PM Washington D.C. / 9 November – 3:12AM London

This is utterly stunning. Clearly absolute panic and dejection in the Clinton camp right now. She always was a terrible candidate. What were the Democrats thinking?

That thrill / nervousness everyone is feeling right now, as the presidential election result teeters on a knife edge? That’s the feeling you get when a country is sovereign, and the outcome of elections actually matters because politicians and their choices are not constrained by, say, a supranational political union of some kind. This is hopefully what British elections will start to feel like – because they will actually matter again, because citizens might actually notice a tangible difference based on who wins.

I, like many others, want my politics hard, existential, frightening even, addressing the biggest questions facing humanity: freedom, progress, morality, war, the future. But all we’re being offered is a choice between managers, primarily of Britain’s economic decline. ‘Who will YOU trust to shave the public deficit?’

Politics at its best should encompass the big decisions about freedom, responsibility and the role of the state. We have been blasé about our politics because by and large our constrained political decisions have not much mattered for the past few decades. With Brexit, that could be about to change for us – which makes it all the more important that we are all informed and engaged citizens.

Under the American Constitution, any president is rightly constrained in what they can do without the consent and cooperation of the other two branches of government. So fear not – Donald Trump will not be able to do all of the crazy things he has indicated he wants to do, in the event that he does win. But yes, the winner of the American presidential election matters, because America is a free country, more so than Britain at present. Hopefully we in Britain will soon know this freedom – and hopefully we will make wise choices with the power we claim back for ourselves.

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8 November – 9:45PM Washington D.C. / 9 November – 2:45AM London

Like Brexit all over again?

With the race having potentially tipped in Donald Trump’s favour, many are now highlighting comparisons with the British EU referendum returns as they came in, with initial Remainer confidence giving way to doubt, and then panic:

The Trump candidacy exposed what seems an unbridgeable gulf between this political class and the nation in whose name it purports to speak.

Consider the litany of horrors it has charged Trump with.

He said John McCain was no hero, that some Mexican illegals are “rapists.” He mocked a handicapped reporter. He called some women “pigs.” He wants a temporary ban to Muslim immigration. He fought with a Gold Star mother and father. He once engaged in “fat-shaming” a Miss Universe, calling her “Miss Piggy,” and telling her to stay out of Burger King. He allegedly made crude advances on a dozen women and starred in the “Access Hollywood” tape with Billy Bush.

While such “gaffes” are normally fatal for candidates, Trump’s followers stood by him through them all.

Why? asks an alarmed establishment. Why, in spite of all this, did Trump’s support endure? Why did the American people not react as they once would have? Why do these accusations not have the bite they once did?

Answer. We are another country now, an us-or-them country.

Middle America believes the establishment is not looking out for the nation but for retention of its power. And in attacking Trump it is not upholding some objective moral standard but seeking to destroy a leader who represents a grave threat to that power.

Trump’s followers see an American Spring as crucial, and they are not going to let past boorish behavior cause them to abandon the last best chance to preserve the country they grew up in.

Look, I get the anti-establishment thing. I do. After all, I’m a Brexiteer, and the fight to secure Britain’s secession from the European Union was nothing of not a David vs Goliath, insurgents vs establishment showdown. But Donald Trump is not a plucky anti-establishment hero whose only flaws are a few youthful indiscretions. Trump’s character flaws have been exposed over and over again during this election campaign, often at about 3AM on Twitter. If temperament matters at all, Trump’s temperament makes him ineligible for the presidency.

But more than that, Trump is simply not a conservative. He believes in a large, coercive state exercising considerable power over individuals and corporations alike. He almost never speaks about liberty and freedom because they simply do not register as important to him.

Unfortunately Trumpism cannot be easily put back in the bottle now it has been released. First, it must be defeated in November, however unappealing the thought of giving the Washington establishment four more years in charge may be. And then the rebuilding of American conservatism must start – a difficult feat since so many of its most intelligent and respected figures have sullied themselves by bending the knee to Donald Trump.

[..] Great electoral rewards await the first party to grapple with the core question of how to reconcile the imperatives of globalisation with the need to equip citizens with the skills and services needed to prosper in a modern economy which can no longer promise a high standard of living for mass unskilled labour. Republicans have the harder job here – the conservative emphasis on self-sufficiency and a small state requires inventive solutions, whereas the Democrats can wave their hands and simply promise a new government program. It’s a difficult issue for conservatives, one which this blog is still struggling to work through.

This is the challenge now facing American conservatives. The culture wars are not insignificant, and there are battles to be fought – some of which this blog sympathises with (political correctness, free speech, religious freedom) and others less so. But no longer will it be enough for Republican politicians to stoke anger about these issues while failing to meaningfully tackle them, or to ignore the economic interests of the American working and lower middle class – doing so will only open the door to another Trump-style populist insurgency.

But if the GOP is now to be the party of protectionism and statism then the conservative coalition is fatally fractured, and we will be set for a generation of Democrat rule.

Obama is also right to encourage Americans to remain politically engaged beyond election year. This will be particularly interesting to observe among Donald Trump’s supporters, should the election go against them. Will the forces that the Trump campaign mustered remain active and visible, will they melt away altogether, or can they be marshalled by another leader or movement capable of articulating their legitimate grievances without the negative personal baggage of Donald Trump?

Regardless, the president’s message is well taken. As this blog has already observed, America is a far greater country than either of the two rather small figures vying to become its next president.

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8 November – 8:20PM Washington D.C. / 9 November – 1:20AM London

The Trump Effect claims its first victim

In a hint of the electoral carnage which could hit down-ticket Republicans unable to escape from Donald Trump’s shadow, Republican senator Mark Kirk of Illinois (who first won election back while I was living in Chicago) has been defeated by his Democratic challenger, Rep. Tammy Duckworth:

Conversely, conservatives who do support Donald Trump (or intend to vote for him) should have the decency to explain their decision and defend it in public, rather than trying to skulk along unnoticed.

Republican senator Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania fails this test. From the Washington Post:

Embroiled in a difficult reelection campaign, first-term Republican Sen. Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania refused for months to say whether he would support his party’s presidential nominee.

His opponent, Democrat Katie McGinty, publicly pushed him to take a stand, but Toomey stayed mum. Until now.

Waiting until about an hour before polls closed, Toomey voted and then revealed that he had backed Donald Trump for president after all, according to The Morning Call.

Earlier in the day, McGinty’s campaign put out a particularly harsh news release chastising Toomey for waiting until the last minute to say whom he would support.

“Pat Toomey is officially the most craven and self-interested politician in the country,” said McGinty’s spokesman, Josh Levitt. “Let’s be clear here: Pat Toomey is intentionally waiting until millions of his constituents have already voted today before making clear to them who he supports to be our next commander in chief.”

What utterly craven behaviour. If Toomey lacked the decency to come clean and admit his presidential preference to his constituents then he does not deserve to represent them for another term in the United States Senate.

It has become a tradition on Election Day for voters to leave their “I Voted” stickers on the grave of women’s suffrage activist Susan B. Anthony in Rochester, N.Y.

Mount Hope Cemetery announced Tuesday it would extend its visiting hours “to accommodate those wishing to celebrate their vote at Susan B. Anthony’s gravesite.” The cemetery normally closes at 7 p.m., but it will remain open until 9 p.m., when polls close in New York.

Some cynics (ahem) might point out that it would be even more inspiring if the woman on the cusp of winning the presidency were somebody else…

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8 November – 7:45PM Washington D.C. / 9 November – 12:45AM London

Blame Eisenhower

One might think that the modern age of television politics began with the Nixon / Kennedy campaign of 1960, but Jordan Michael Smith of The American Conservative notes that President Dwight Eisenhower, Kennedy’s predecessor, is responsible for many of the innovations in political campaigning which we have long taken for granted:

It is undeniable that Ike introduced some regrettable practices into American politics. Though John F. Kennedy is often remembered as the man who first exploited the power of television, College of New Jersey professor David Haven Blake establishes that it was his presidential predecessor who was the real trailblazer. “Guided by television pioneers and Madison Avenue advertising executives whom insiders dubbed ‘Mad Men,’ he cultivated scores of famous supporters as a way of building the kind of broad-based support that had eluded Republicans for twenty years,” he writes. Liking Ike is the most comprehensive treatment yet of the ways in which the two Eisenhower presidential campaigns launched the commodification of American politicians.

Jingles, commercials, televised endorsements, biographical videos—all were initially the products of the minds of New York ad agencies. Broadway performers took the stage at Madison Square Garden to gin up support for him, animators created television commercials, and Irving Berlin composed the song, “I Like Ike.” This large-scale manufactured enthusiasm all seems commonplace now, but employing the power of celebrity had never been done on this scale before Eisenhower. Warren Harding and Franklin Roosevelt had benefited from campaign appearances by entertainers, but television’s national reach made 1952 a watershed year for celebrity politics.

Eisenhower was the overseer of the merger of entertainment, advertisement, and politics. Perhaps it was inevitable that campaigns would realize the potential of television and treat candidates like any other product, to be packaged and sold and bought in large quantities. Blake repeats comically naïve statements from Eisenhower’s Democratic Party rival, Adlai Stevenson, and Stevenson’s campaign staffer George Ball. “They have conceived not an election campaign in the usual sense but a super colossal, multi-million dollar production designed to sell an inadequate ticket to the American people in precisely the way they sell soap, ammoniated toothpaste, hair tonic or bubble gum,” Ball complained in a speech called “The Corn Flakes Campaign.” But Eisenhower knew the influence that celebrities and novel products had on Americans.

Former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, Donald Trump’s friend and adviser, said in an interview early Tuesday evening that he had just left a small gathering with the Republican nominee at Trump Tower. Trump, he said, was in his apartment “watching everything even though I’m telling him not to.”

Giuliani said Trump was drinking Diet Coke as he eyed the television and the initial returns out of several states. At 6 p.m., Trump had not yet eaten dinner.

“He’s calm. We’re all cautiously optimistic,” Giuliani said when asked to describe the mood at Trump’s home. “We think it’s going to be very, very close. We know there is a populism across the country that’s powerful and he has been lifted by it.”

On George W. Bush and others not voting for Trump, Giuliani said he and others close to Trump shrugged off the reports today. “It doesn’t hurt at this point. Everybody knew that’s where they were.”

The former New York City mayor said he left to do a television hit. “The last thing I said was, ‘Don’t pay attention until the results are in.’ I’ve learned a few things over the years.”

It’s probably good that Giuliani is leaving Trump’s side. One can only imagine the counsel that he would be giving an agitated Trump if and when the results begin to turn against him.

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8 November – 7:20PM Washington D.C. / 9 November – 12:20AM London

Getting their excuses in early

Already we are seeing some signs of pre-emptive finger-pointing from senior members of the Trump campaign, with campaign manager Kellyanne Conway complaining that Donald Trump had not received the full support of the GOP hierarchy.

In what sounded a lot like scapegoating in the event of a loss, Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway suggested her candidate was hurt by not having the full weight of the Republican establishment behind him.

On MSNBC, Conway told Chuck Todd that if Trump loses narrowly it would be “too bad” that “we have former presidents not voting for us, former nominees not voting for us.”

“That’s got to hurt,” she said, according to the exchange reported by the Wall Street Journal. “When you talk about growing the party, the idea was growing it, but having that base together.”

[..] While Conway appeared to be largely complaining about those party standard bearers, it does seem like an about face from earlier in the day when the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee held a joint conference call with reporters to discuss how well situated they were to win.

While some prominent anti-Trump conservatives have also been feeling the heat:

Sorry, but no. Donald Trump – and Trump alone – is responsible for killing the better ideas that he espoused in this campaign by forever associating them with his boorish, ignorant and ungentlemanly persona. Somebody needed to challenge the bipartisan consensus on immigration and resistance to things like term limits, but the fact that Trump championed these ideas has made them fringe at best, and toxic at worst.

Nobody has betrayed Trump voters more than Donald Trump himself.

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8 November – 7:05PM Washington D.C. / 9 November – 12:05AM London

An important but depressing reminder that whoever prevails tonight will start off deep underwater with the American people in terms of popularity and trust:

MSNBC’s Steve Kornacki is reporting that the early national exit polls show, as expected, a massive gap between the enthusiasm level of college-educated whites and non-college-educated whites for Trump.

But while Trump is outperforming by ten points Mitt Romney’s 2012 showing among whites without a college degree (+26 vs. +36), he’s doing much worse among college-educated whites: Romney won these voters by 14 points; Trump is winning them by only a single point.

Stark, but unsurprising.

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8 November – 6:35PM Washington D.C. / 11:35PM London

Florida looking favourable for Clinton

VoteCastr reports that Hillary Clinton currently leads Donald Trump in Florida by about 300,000 votes, with both candidates already having surpassed the totals amassed by Barack Obama and Mitt Romney respectively back in 2012.

Josh Voorhees provides this commentary:

The Sunshine State is essentially a must-win for Donald Trump. If Hillary Clinton were to win the 19 states (plus the District of Columbia) that have voted for the Democratic nominee in each of the past six presidential elections, she could clinch the presidency simply by claiming Florida’s 29 electoral votes. Right now, things are looking pretty good on that front. (Numbers current as of 4:12 p.m. EST.)

Again: VoteCastr is not saying Clinton will win Florida, only that she appears to be leading at this moment based on early voting and today’s estimated turnout, which has already exceeded the state’s 2012 vote total. It’s entirely possible that Trump could make up ground later in the day, particularly given that Florida’s traditionally conservative panhandle is in the Central time zone, and is therefore an hour behind the rest of the state. Still, Clinton’s camp is likely celebrating the fact that her estimated Florida vote total has already topped Obama’s total from 2012, when he beat Mitt Romney there by less than a percentage point.

One reason the Clinton campaign is likely optimistic about her chances in Florida is the strong showing of Hispanic voters in the state, which was evident during early voting. As the New York Times points out, Florida voters who indicated they were Hispanic on their voter registration forms cast as many early ballots this year as they cast total ballots in 2012, when they accounted for 12 percent of the Florida electorate. That enthusiasm seems to have continued on Election Day.

According to VoteCastr, Clinton currently holds a lead of 600,000-plus estimated votesin the five Florida counties that are predominantly nonwhite. That advantage more than offsets Trump’s current advantage in predominantly white counties.

If Trump loses Florida to Clinton then it is pretty much game over for his presidential hopes. Hillary Clinton has to be feeling quite good right now.

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8 November – 6:12PM Washington D.C. / 11:12PM London

Technical issues

Apologies for the interruption – technical issues with my news feeds have meant I spent the last two hours troubleshooting (in vain) rather than doing the blogging I wanted to do.

I would like to single out the useless Sony corporation for particular venom and criticism for their technologically backward, user un-friendly smart TVs which single handedly ruined my election evening – thanks guys, great job.

Anyway, back to work.

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8 November – 12:00PM Washington D.C. / 5:00PM London

America is better than this

Tim Stanley is that rare thing among British political commentators who presume to offer their opinion about American politics – someone who actually knows his subject. I say that not because I was briefly a contemporary of his at Cambridge, but because as a student of American history and someone who actually spends a decent amount of his time in the United States, he has the kind of everyday interactions with ordinary Americans outside of election season which are crucial to understanding the national psyche.

Therefore, unlike other journalists who parachute in every four years to airly offer their ignorant opinions, one can give Stanley’s assessments a little more weight than those big names who write fatuously about something of which they are largely ignorant.

In an excellent column for the Telegraph, Tim Stanley makes number of good points. Firstly, that while Donald Trump is odious and utterly unworthy of election as president, we should not be reduced to cowering in our safe spaces at the mere thought of his election:

Some of my liberal friends feel I should be running around in panic, proving how worthy I am by denouncing Trump as a Nazi. Sorry. Won’t do it. One reason is that the alternative to him genuinely leaves me cold. Clinton is an empty pantsuit. Her campaign has been predicated on three things: I am not Trump; I am a woman; Bruce Springsteen likes me. She is also enthusiastic about legalised partial-birth abortion – so, no, I won’t be joining the ranks of “regrettably for Hillary.”

I also honestly believe Trump isn’t quite the danger people – especially non-Americans – think he is. His views on women are vile; his stance on refugees turns my stomach. He is unethical and unenlightened. But he has probably damaged the conservative movement far more than he can ever hurt the rest of the country.

Why? Partly because it’s ungovernable. Fifty states, all pulling in different directions, are barely led by a president who can be controlled and even impeached by Congress. Size matters, too. This country is so damned big. As I drove out of Washington DC, it was striking how humanity melted away. The odd town; a couple of farms. But otherwise an enormous, epic landscape that defies conquest. America and its republic are larger than Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.

This is so true. America is far bigger than either of the two very small individuals running for the presidency in 2016. Even Barack Obama, elected on a wave of “hope and change” fever in 2008, was able to do little to dramatically reshape the country, even for those early years when Democrats held Congress and the White House.

A Trump (or indeed a Clinton) presidency would be stymied in many of its worst aspects by the same gridlock. Now, that gridlock presents challenges of its own – sometimes America suffers from not being more politically and institutionally nimble – but it is also an effective firewall against ill-considered attempts to dramatically reshape the country.

Stanley continues:

Nothing is new. Politics shifts from Left to Right, and those who lose power can never quite grasp what is happening to them. In the past few years we’ve seen a shift in the West away from liberalism – and many liberals have reacted as though this was unreasonable and appalling.

Like Louis XVI’s aristocrats, they couldn’t see how distasteful their habits were to most people. Free trade has not benefited everyone, my lords; mass immigration has social costs. Cultural liberalism is actually a bit weird. And the enormous, vulgar disparities in wealth add to the sense that it’s not fair, something must be up, the system must be rigged.

When you’ve descended from a family of factory engineers to a family of Walmart greeters within a single generation, that’s not an unreasonable conclusion to reach. What is unreasonable is assuming that Donald Trump – who has been rigging things his whole damn life – is your champion.

But if people think that then it’s the mainstream’s fault. Centrists didn’t have to become so distant. It wouldn’t take much to help reconnect. If Labour, for instance, dropped Jeremy Corbyn, elected an ordinary man or woman and endorsed “Brexit within the single market,” then it might well win a general election. It’s Labour’s choice to deny the voters than option. Just as it was the Republican Party’s decision to surrender their nomination to Trump by failing to address immigration or free trade. Centrists have no right to castigate the people for this situation. The voters aren’t all dumb bigots. They’ve just got very limited choices.

Yes. As has happened in Britain, a growing chasm has opened in America between what Brendan O’Neill once termed the “middle class clerisy” – the urban, large-L liberal types with their trendy progressive opinions – and the bulk of the country. These people could have sought to bring the country with them, to respond to their concerns and focus on things that really matter (like jobs and living standards, rather than, say, transgender bathroom issues). But the fevered pursuit of left-wing, identity politics goals meant that the struggling working classes were often ignored, pushed down the priority list.

Take immigration – there has been a near universal effort among the political elite, particularly the Democrats, to undermine the idea of national borders, to encourage and celebrate illegal immigration (delegates at the Philadelphia convention stood and cheered illegal immigrants brought onto the stage to boast of their status) and even subvert the language to encourage people to accept the status quo, with politicians and many journalisms now referring to “undocumented” rather than “illegal” immigrants.

Meanwhile, the concerns of Americans who object have simply been ignored. One can hardly be surprised that many of these people have now gone shopping for an alternative, even if one strongly disagrees that Donald Trump is the solution to their problems.

Tim’s conclusion is also spot-on:

If the citizens do choose Hillary on election day, what does this mean? That given a contest between radical populism and dead-from-the-neck-up centrism, they still, on balance, prefer the latter. Liberal jeremiads will be proven wrong. Liberals will have to learn to love the voters again – and stop treating them like the wild animals out in the dark who prowl around the house at night looking for food. Speak to them like adults. Reason with them. Talk about bringing jobs back; about country, home and God. Franklin D Roosevelt used that language, and his grasp of American spirituality won him four elections.

Even if they prevail today, the Democrats have a mountain to climb in terms of actually learning to love the whole country again. One could level the same charge at the Republicans, of course, who lag badly with many minority voting constituencies. But this is already well known. By contrast, few commentators seem willing to mention to contempt bordering on hatred which the liberal half of the country is coming to view the conservative half – probably because most journalists and commentators belong firmly to the liberal camp themselves, and see nothing abnormal about viewing those who disagree with them as morally and intellectually inferior.

But this poisonous and contemptuous attitude – which at its purest level can be summarised as “what are all those Trump people complaining about? Modern America is working just great for me and the people I know, and anyone who disagrees must be ignorant at best or racist at worse” – could undermine the Democrats just as America’s demographics otherwise really start to tip in their favour.

Say what you want about his socialism, but Bernie Sanders at least understood and tapped into the suffering and anger of struggling Americans in a sincere and legitimate way. For all her slogans and her team’s careful positioning of her on the issues, Hillary Clinton is nothing but a continuity candidate, a bit two fingers stuck up at conservatives by the establishment.

And at some point, once Clinton has made her victory speech (in which case she will doubtless pledge to be a president for all Americans, even those who did not vote for her), the victory parties have finished and everybody has got some much-needed sleep, it would do the Democrats well to ask themselves exactly what kind of outreach they are prepared to make to the half of the country left utterly unmoved by her message.

This is what we now know. Donald Trump is the first candidate for president who seems to have little understanding of or reverence for constitutional democracy and presents himself as a future strongman. This begins with his character — if that word could possibly be ascribed to his disturbed, unstable, and uncontrollable psyche. He has revealed himself incapable of treating other people as anything but instruments to his will. He seems to have no close friends, because he can tolerate no equals. He never appears to laugh, because that would cede a recognition to another’s fleeting power over him. He treats his wives and his children as mere extensions of his power, and those who have resisted the patriarch have been exiled, humiliated, or bought off.

His relationship to men — from his school days to the primary campaign — is rooted entirely in dominance and mastery, through bullying, intimidation, and, if necessary, humiliation. His relationship to women is entirely a function of his relationship to men: Women are solely a means to demonstrate his superiority in the alpha-male struggle. Women are to be pursued, captured, used, assaulted, or merely displayed to other men as an indication of his superiority. His response to any difficult relationship is to end it, usually by firing or humiliating or ruining someone. His core, motivating idea is the punishment or mockery of the weak and reverence for the strong. He cannot apologize or accept responsibility for failure. He has long treated the truth as entirely instrumental to his momentary personal interests. Setbacks of any kind can only be assuaged by vindictive, manic revenge.

He has no concept of a non-zero-sum engagement, in which a deal can be beneficial for both sides. A win-win scenario is intolerable to him, because mastery of others is the only moment when he is psychically at peace. (This is one reason why he cannot understand the entire idea of free trade or, indeed, NATO, or the separation of powers.) In any conflict, he cannot ever back down; he must continue to up the ante until the danger to everyone around him is so great as to demand their surrender. From his feckless business deals and billion-dollar debts to his utter indifference to the damage he has done to those institutions unfortunate enough to engage him, he has shown no concern for the interests of other human beings. Just ask the countless people he has casually fired, or the political party he has effectively destroyed. He has violated and eroded the core norms that make liberal democracy possible — because such norms were designed precisely to guard against the kind of tyrannical impulses and pathological narcissism he personifies.

Read the whole thing – there’s much, much more. Andrew Sullivan openly admits that he is an emotional character, prone to hyperbole, but it is very hard to dispute the charges which he lays at Donald Trump’s feet. They form the core of the reason why this blog cannot support Trump, and would prefer four years of Clintonian big government statism, divisive identity politics and other assorted left-wingery than place the fate of the Republic in his hands.

On this day, over a quarter of a century ago, the best living former President of the United States was elected. George Walker Herbert Bush is not the most eloquent man to have held the office. Nor is he the most electorally successful. Nor was he the most popular with his own party: how could he have been, when he followed Ronald Reagan? Nor is he identified, like “the Gipper”, with representing a body of ideas, reflecting America back to itself, and changing the course of history. But Bush was a fine President, in at least one way a better one than Reagan, and his reputation continues to grow – towering over the moral dwarf who succeeds him as Republican candidate today.

We are reminded of Bush Sr.’s heroism:

Volunteering to serve in the Second World War, like so many of his generation, he became the youngest pilot in the U.S Navy, and was nearly killed in action. His plane was shot down while trying to knock out a Japanese radio transmission station. His two fellow crewmen died. Bush leaped from the plane, injuring his head on the back of it, and ripped his parachute, dropping faster because of the tear. He was lucky not to fall into the hands of the Japanese, being eventually fished out of the water by an American submarine.

As well as his pragmatism, at home and abroad:

Reagan’s successor as Republican candidate was distrusted on the right of the party, and Bush over-compensated in consequence, making his famous pledge: “read lips: no new taxes”. It was one that he abandoned in office. Perhaps in reaction to his predecessor, “the Great Communicator”, he didn’t strive to explain why. Bush believed that action, and not words, would be enough: that the American people would grasp that the deficit had to be reduced without the case having to be pitched to them.

It turned out not to be so – and, in any event, there is a cycle in politics. The Republicans had won three successive presidential elections, and America wanted change by 1992. That the country had been in recession helped to drive the mood. But Bush was right about the public finances. “The deficit is big enough to look after itself,” Reagan once said, but to say so is to laugh reality off, or try to. Indeed, Bush’s stewardship of the economy, by an irony of the kind familiar in politics, helped to pave the way for two terms of the man who defeated him, Bill Clinton.

Elsewhere at home, Bush got a lot done in his single term, working with Congress to improve education, expand free trade, protect the environment, and pass the Americans with Disabilities Act – the model for our own Disability Discrimination Act, steered through by William Hague under John Major. And abroad, Bush brought all his experience to bear at a tumultous time. His judgement call was to back Gorbachev, who he originally distrusted, and it proved to be right. Bush eased the collapse of communism by not publicly celebrating the fact. America was the dominant world power by the time Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, and Bush used its position to form an overarching international coalition that took the country back.

Also notable is the grace with which George H W Bush handled defeat and consignment to a one-term presidency by Bill Clinton in the 1992 election:

A measure of the man is his attitude to the man who beat him. “Dear Bill,” he wrote in a note to Clinton, as he himself left the White House, There will be very tough times, made even more difficult by criticism you may not think is fair. I’m not a very good one to give advice; but just don’t let the critics discourage you or push you off course. You will be our President when you read this note. I wish you well. I wish your family well. Your success now is our country’s success. I am rooting hard for you. Good luck – George.”

Heroism, pragmatism, resolve, grace and good character – even one of these characteristics would be seen as a remarkable improvement in 2016’s Republican Party presidential nominee. How far we have fallen.

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8 November – 6:10AM Washington D.C. / 11:10AM London

What if the result is contested?

Politico considers what might happen if voting irregularities or other disputes mean that the election is contested, given that the Supreme Court (which would probably have to decide the case) is currently down one member following the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, and therefore effectively poised 4-4 between the liberal and conservative elements.

It’s the campaign scenario that keeps partisan operatives and lawyers awake at night: Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton end Election Day deadlocked with key states in a recount, and a short-handed Supreme Court can’t resolve the matter because the eight justices split down the middle.

In such a case, a lower-court ruling would probably be left to stand, and the decision would carry even less authority than Bush v. Gore, the high court’s widely criticized 5-4 ruling resolving the 2000 presidential election.

With Trump and Clinton concluding one of the most toxic presidential campaigns in modern history, amid charges of foreign influence and “rigged” procedures, the lack of a fully functioning Supreme Court to act as a legal backstop is worrisome to some operatives on both sides.

“There’s a hell of a scary thought,” said Jim Manley, a longtime Democratic staffer. “I’m not sure the country can handle that right now.”

“This would not be a good moment for the Supreme Court to have to deal with a partisan dispute,” added Trevor Potter, a veteran Republican attorney and former chairman at the Federal Election Commission.

And while most polls currently show Trump losing fairly decisively, his rhetoric on the campaign stump – and that of many of his supporters, who have been told again and again that the only way they can possibly lose is if Hillary Clinton rigs the election – is likely to ensure at least some degree of post-defeat denial if the result does indeed go Clinton’s way:

Trump’s real estate and business career are coursed with litigation and the Republican has run his presidential campaign alleging everything from voter fraud to widespread “rigging” by the political establishment and the media.

“It does seem if Trump loses there’s going to be challenges to the voting results. When you spend all your time saying the results are rigged you’ve got to expect there are lawsuits challenging results,” said Adam Winkler, a UCLA constitutional law professor.

The issue is not an insurmountable one, and the probability of a contested election landing in the lap of the Supreme Court is probably highly unlikely. But there could scarcely be a worse time for the unlikely to happen.

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8 November – 5:45AM Washington D.C. / 10:45AM London

No, Donald Trump is not like Brexit

One of the more sickening things about this US presidential election campaign for people such as myself has been the way that many pundits, amply aided by unsavoury characters on both sides, have been drawing links between the UK’s vote to secede from the European Union and the rise of Donald Trump.

To be very clear: no, Donald Trump is not like Brexit. The campaign for Brexit was very much an anti-establishment movement, yes. But it also had as its goal something rather pure and noble, when you strip away all of the huffing about immigration and the invective on both sides. The purpose of Brexit was to remove Britain from a deeply anti-democratic and relentlessly integrating political union whose direction of travel remains a federal Europe which almost none of its citizens want. By voting to leave the EU, we are asserting that the British people and our laws should be sovereign, and not the rulings of a remote collection of unloved and (largely) unknown institutions in Brussels.

Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy, by contrast, is great at making the establishment squirm – and often for very valid reasons. Trump captured the GOP nomination in large part thanks to a groundswell of anger at years of betrayals by Republican elites, whose rhetoric and policies in government and opposition have often worked directly against the interests of their party base. But beyond making the establishment squirm, there is no positive good to come from electing a man so ignorant, egomaniacal and unstable to the presidency. With Brexit, we got to poke the establishment in the eye and win back our democracy. With Trump, Americans will get to poke the establishment and themselves in the eye, and very little else will change, at least for the better.

Of course, this has not stopped UKIP’s Nigel Farage, distressed at finding himself out of the limelight and largely cut out of the picture when it comes to enacting Brexit, from flying to the United States and draping his arm around Donald Trump at every possible opportunity. And nor has it prevented the candidate himself from swanning around the country declaring that his election as president will be “Brexit plus plus plus“:

Let’s get one thing straight; Trump and Brexit could not be further separate. Some people, primarily the smouldering remains of UKIP’s membership base, have got it in their heads that Trump is a continuation of a movement sparked by Brexit, and that Trump’s nationalism is exactly what Brexit was about. In fact, it would also seem that The Donald himself believes this twisted narrative; backed up by his advisor Nigel Farage, who he dubs ‘Mr. Brexit’.

Brexiteers who also support Trump know that by touting these two separate phenomena as the same, you are living up to what our nay-sayers accused us of. Bastions of the metropolitan elite such as the BBC and The Guardian touted us as fear-mongers, abusing the dissatisfaction of the lower classes and demonising immigrants to win the referendum. Whilst some people in the campaign were unsavoury at times; as someone who knocked on more doors and gave out more leaflets than he should have been during his A-Level exams, I can tell you that we were a campaign of hope.

Everyone I talked to wanted to leave the EU because they had higher hopes for our nation. They dreamed of a free Britain on the global-stage, and of the repatriation of powers to our people. It wasn’t nationalism in the traditional regressive sense, we wanted a new Britain, not and old one. In fact, the statistics show that the ability to control immigration in to Britain ranked only as the third most common reason people voted to Leave. People’s fears made up part of the vote, as they do in any election, but aspirations and dreams of a better future made up the bulk our campaign and our voters.

Trump’s campaign is the antithesis of our campaign. Whilst I do concede that there are some similarities between the voters in both phenomena, I refuse to recognise any real similarities beyond a few salient links. For example, many people are voting for Trump because they are sick and tired of a Washington Elite, closely related to the Brussels Elite, symbolised in the Clinton dynasty’s latest attempt at the White House. Lots of his voters also wish to control immigration to some greater extent than it is currently controlled. However, that is where the similarities end, with the key difference being that Trump’s campaign is far closer to ‘Project Fear’ than it is to Vote Leave.

Ultimately, one of the good things about the EU referendum and Brexit – and one of the reasons that people felt secure in voting to leave – is that they knew they could achieve something they dearly wanted as well as kick the establishment, but still not end up ruled by the leaders of the Leave campaign.

Britons knew that they were not electing Vote Leave or Leave.EU, the official and second largest pro-Brexit campaigns respectively, to any official government role. And indeed it now turns out that a former Remain-supporter, Theresa May, has succeeded David Cameron as prime minister, and is pursuing Brexit in the manner that she sees as most suitable, not according to the hyperbolic and often ambiguous claims of the Leave campaign.

With Donald Trump, Americans will not have this firewall. Expressing dissatisfaction with the status quo and the political elite by electing Donald Trump means that Trump will then be president for at least four years (or until he gets impeached). Americans would be very much voting for the man just as much as his ideals, to the extent that he even has any.

So let’s have no more lazy journalistic talk of Donald Trump representing America’s Brexit. Many (if most) Brexiteers are horrified or at least concerned by the Trump candidacy, which in no way reflects the long and principled history of our own movement.

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7 November – 8:45PM Washington D.C. / 8 November – 1:45AM London

D-Day

Hello and welcome to this semi-partisan live blog of the United States presidential election day and results. This feed will remain open and regularly updated from now all the way through polling day, into the night of 8 November as the results come in and then on to the morning of 9 November as we review the aftermath and (quite possibly) pick through the wreckage.

For newcomers to this blog, I write from the perspective of a British chap and future American citizen married to a proud Texan girl, currently living in London but ultimately destined to move back to the United States (timing potentially dependent on the outcome of this election!)

I have lived and worked in Chicago and the Mid West, travelled widely throughout America, follow American politics as closely as British, and so feel more than justified in weighing in with my numerous opinions. Those still in doubt as to my credentials can read my brief bio here, and a more long-winded version here.

To paraphrase PJ O’Rourke, Clinton is the kind of bad that America has endured before, is used to and can withstand for a time, while Donald Trump is an unstable and unknown quantity whose personal flaws as exposed throughout this election campaign – together with his disrespect for the Constitution and complete disinterest in the detail of policy – mean he is all risk and very little upside, save giving the establishment a good kicking.

Anyhow, that’s where I stand. I have a stash of Red Bull and a constant stream of coffee brewing, and will be glad of your company as I live-blog election day. Please feel free to use the Comments, or to contact/troll me on Twitter or by email.

Live Blog: Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton face off in their final live televised debate

Debate Time: 6PM Pacific Time / 2AM UK Time

Well, that was by far the best of the three presidential debates. Chris Wallace had by far the most gravitas of all of the moderators called to undertake this most difficult of tasks (shaming those who questioned his abilities simply because he works for Fox News), and broadly kept things on track. I particularly liked the way that he ordered his questions, ensuring that the debate started with substantive policy discussions, with the more contentious issues (the personality based stuff) sandwiched in the middle.

Others seem to agree that this debate was a cut above the rest:

The most substantive debate, excellently moderated by Wallace. #debatenight

The headline that most pundits will take away is the “shock” revelation from Donald Trump that he will not necessarily accept the result of the presidential election if he is not declared the victor. I have no idea why they are surprised – Trump has been essentially making that very point continually for weeks now, with his accusation that the election is being “rigged” by Hillary Clinton and a compliant media. If you really do believe that the election is stacked against you (as Trump seems to have persuaded himself), why on earth would you concede in the event of defeat? This isn’t a matter of agreeing with Trump, it’s a matter of logic.

Will Trump’s refusal to accept the validity of the election upfront actually harm him? Well, in terms of everything else that he has done over the course of this campaign I don’t see how this will be any more off-putting to undecided voters than his other antics. And of course it will be red meat to his most ardent supporters.

But from a policy perspective, what did we actually learn from this most policy-focused of the three debates? Well, essentially the candidates simply reinforced what we already knew. Hillary Clinton sees government and the state as the answer to nearly every question, even those questions which nobody has asked yet. She wants to “invest” in the American people, which sounds positive until you remember that investors tend to demand a dividend or some other type of return for their largesse.

Donald Trump, meanwhile, gave no more evidence that he has actually studied the issues or gained a level of expertise (or even curiosity) beyond the same glib soundbites that one would expect from a first-term congressman in a very safe Republican district. Repealing and replacing Obamacare, but with what? We still don’t really know. Rebuilding the military, but in what areas and to what levels? We don’t know. Eliminating the budget deficit and tackling the national debt? Sure. But how? Donald Trump will tell us later.

And so the decision before American voters remains as unappetising as ever:

Hillary Clinton remains this blog’s choice, for the simple reason that she is the type of uninspiring, statist technocrat that Americans have had before (and proven that they can endure), while Donald Trump represents a leap off a cliff. It is a thoroughly depressing choice, but the only conceivable choice that this blog can make.

Andrew Sullivan seems to be drinking the Kool-Aid and actually mustering enthusiasm for Clinton, which is more than I can do:

I mean, he’s not wrong in terms of Trump’s temperamental unsuitability for office. But was this a “devastating” defeat for Trump from the perspective of viewers? I think not. In fact, Trump may have just squeaked another points victory in this debate. What may well be devastating from Trump, though, is the fact that he failed to score the kind of knock-out victory that he really needed.

Points victories and incremental improvements will not save Donald Trump at this point. And Democrats, together with conservatives of conscience, should probably be very grateful that he failed to do much better.

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7:36PM Las Vegas / 3:36AM London

Apparently the candidates did not agree to closing statements. Chris Wallace blindsides them by demanding one anyway, one minute each. Good for him. These debates have all suffered for not having the candidates try to wrap up their message and key themes (as far as Trump can claim to have a “theme” at the end.

Clinton says she will do “everything I can to ensure you have good jobs and rising incomes”.

Trump says “she is raising money from the people she wants to control. It doesn’t work that way”. Whereas Clinton painted a positive message (as one would expect from the continuity candidate), Trump paints a dark vision of America where “you get shot walking to school”, the military is run down and everything is bad.

“We cannot take four more years of Barack Obama, and that’s what you get with her”, Trump concludes.

And that’s a wrap.

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7:32PM Las Vegas / 3:32AM London

Good final question by Chris Wallace, asking candidates whether they would adopt a “grand bargain” to save entitlements incorporating benefit cuts and tax increases to share the pain.

Trump immediately pivots to the need to “repeal and replace ObamaCare”. He won’t ask anything of Americans or suggest that difficult decisions or sacrifices might have to be made. No, everything is easy in Trump Land. Everything can be fixed by signing another great trade deal or standing up to China. This is just infantile, superficial stuff.

Clinton says that she will “raise taxes on the wealthy”, and makes a witty remark that she would raise taxes on herself “and on Donald, assuming he doesn’t find a way of getting out of it.” But she “will not cut benefits”.

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7:30PM Las Vegas / 3:30AM London

Clinton wants “to invest in you, to invest in your family”. Again, there is no role which she does not envision the state playing in the lives of Americans. But her line about American growth being powered by the middle class rather than the wealthy few will resonate.

Hillary Clinton again specifically describes the picture of the Syrian boy “sitting in an ambulance with blood coming down his face” in an attempt to sentimentalise the need for military action in Syria. Of course, this enlightened humanitarian was also part of an administration which dramatically stepped up drone warfare against numerous targets, including American citizens, and which has been highly reluctant to reveal civilian casualty estimates.

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7:19PM Las Vegas / 3:19AM London

How things stand so far

I generally concur with this assessment:

Trump having by far his best debate. But that's not saying much. Just too much baggage for Clinton to hit him with.

By the greatly warped standards with which we now judge presidential debate performances, this is probably on the money. Trump has been hitting Hillary Clinton very hard, quite effectively in some places, displaying open contempt and derision for her in some places – “Thanks a lot, Hillary, great job!”, he said at one point.

But because of his manifold personal flaws, Hillary Clinton has always had at least ten ready comebacks and zingers to every criticism that Trump has made. Even where he was effective on the email scandal and on foreign policy, Clinton has been able to wriggle her way out of trouble.

From a Clintonian perspective, Hillary can look back with satisfaction thus far. She has remained calm and composed, avoided committing any obvious gaffes once again, and effectively rendered Trump ridiculous-looking (to all but his most committed supporters) at several points. There have been no magisterial moments of brilliance, but then Hillary Clinton isn’t a brilliant political candidate. Agree with her or not, she is a shrewd political operator. But a candidate, not so much.

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7:18PM Las Vegas / 3:18AM London

Hillary Clinton says that Trump is “the most dangerous person to run for president in the modern era.”

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7:16PM Las Vegas / 3:16AM London

Donald Trump hammering Hillary Clinton for the Obama administration’s policy of drawing down troops in Iraq, and the subsequent fall of Mosul and other cities to ISIS.

This would be a whole lot more effective if Donald Trump was not stubbornly and transparently lying about having supported the initial invasion of Iraq.

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7:13PM Las Vegas / 3:13AM London

Cynical Democratic posturing on taxes – and their subverting of language by speaking of “undocumented” rather than “illegal” immigrants – knows no limits:

What is not fair, though, is criticising Donald Trump for offsetting his income tax liability against past business losses. Clinton is in no position to clutch her pearls in faux moral outrage about this – if you don’t want people to take advantage of legitimate tax loopholes, don’t create them and don’t tolerate them.

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7:04PM Las Vegas / 3:04AM London

Hillary Clinton complaining that Donald Trump used money given to his foundation to buy a portrait of himself. Fair enough. But Hillary Clinton hired Sidney Blumenthal to the Clinton Foundation – after the Obama administration forbade her from hiring him at State – for the expressed job of polishing the Clinton legacy. She is in absolutely no position to criticise Donald Trump for being vain.

The point, I suppose, is that a family charitable foundation is a perfectly legitimate option for an ex-president and his family who intend to quit the political game after leaving office. But when this is not the case – when Hillary was pursuing senatorial ambitions and later becoming Secretary of State – conflicts of interest are inevitably going to occur.

When one is as rich and well-connected as the Clintons, acquiring more money becomes of limited interest. Instead, the reason for getting up in the morning after having left the White House often becomes the building of power, influence and legacy – and, of course, keeping the family in the style of living to which they have become accustomed (i.e. minimal contact with ordinary people). A family foundation accomplishes all of these objectives wonderfully. But when one or more members of the family are still politically active it is highly questionable.

It would have been far better, when there are still active political careers in play, for the Clintons to have put ego aside and thrown their support behind an alternative, existing foundation – much like Warren Buffett is giving away much of his wealth to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, recognising that it makes little sense to build up his own philanthropic expertise from scratch and create all the overheads which come from a second foundation when a perfectly good one already exists.

Why did the Clintons not take the Warren Buffett approach? Three reasons – ego, power and prestige. It is great that the Clintons are philanthropically active. But nearly all of their philanthropic work is done through the Clinton Foundation ($1 million to the foundation in 2015 and just $42,000 to another charity), meaning they want to do charity on their terms. It is a few distinct shades further away from pure altruism, and more to do with continuing to exercise power after the White House.

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6:59PM Las Vegas / 2:59AM London

It’s worth pointing out that Hillary Clinton would not be able to make herself look good by reeling off a list of all the indefensible things that Donald Trump has said if the Republican Party had nominated somebody remotely serious. But they didn’t, so here we are.

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6:57PM Las Vegas / 2:57AM London

If we are going to call out devious pivots, then it is only fair to criticise Donald Trump for his evasions too:

Clinton rightly rakes Donald Trump over the coals for scoffing at the possibility that he might have sexually assaulted several women because they were not good looking enough.

“Trump goes after [women’s] dignity, their self worth. And I don’t think that there’s a woman out there who doesn’t know how that feels”, says Clinton. A powerful line.

She then descends into bland platitudes about diversity, and America being great, and our children and grandchildren and blah blah. But it was a calm, measured and broadly effective denunciation of Trump’s character.

Donald Trump denies saying something that he blatantly did say, and accuses Clinton’s campaign of being “sleazy”.

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6:54PM Las Vegas / 2:54AM London

Chris Wallace asks why so many women would make up stories about Donald Trump behaving inappropriately toward them.

Trump responds by alleging that the Clinton campaign fed the stories to the media, and then goes further, accusing Hillary Clinton of fomenting violence at his campaign rallies. In any other presidential campaign that would be an incendiary statement. This time…it’s about average.

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6:52PM Las Vegas / 2:52AM London

I’m not sure that Hillary Clinton’s broad, beaming smile when Donald Trump alleges that “she gave us ISIS” is the best reaction shot…

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6:51PM Las Vegas / 2:51AM London

Looks like Clinton has come with a prepared response to Trump’s “thirty years” criticism this time. She reels off a list of all of her past jobs, contrasting what she was doing at certain points in time with what Donald Trump was doing.

“When I was in the situation room for the Osama Bin Laden raid, he was hosting Celebrity Apprentice”, snaps Clinton. Ouch.

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6:49PM Las Vegas / 2:49AM London

Donald Trump resurrects his “you’ve been around for 30 years; why didn’t you do all these things earlier?” line. It’s effective. I mean, it also completely overstates the political power of a first lady and first-term junior senator, but it is still an effective line.

Again, Donald Trump unfavourably compares the GDP growth of the United States (a developed country) with that of India and China, both developing countries. This is infantile, sheer economic illiteracy. No advanced economy in the world grows at a clip of 8-10%. What is Trump’s secret formula?

She has no good answer on her private remarks about her dream of open borders in the Western hemisphere. And so she tries to shift the question to Putin’s role in Wikileaks. Trump is right: that was a nifty pivot, and he exposed her.

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6:42PM Las Vegas / 2:42AM London

Amazing “free trade deals” are not going to eliminate the budget deficit, Donald Trump, let alone tackle the national debt. It’s a glib answer worthy of a junior congressman, not a presidential candidate.

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6:40PM Las Vegas / 2:40AM London

Clinton mocking Trump’s “trickle-down economics on steroids”.

Well, it’s better than “Trumped-up trickle-down”, I guess.

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6:38PM Las Vegas / 2:38AM London

Naturally Hillary Clinton sees the state as saviour, promising “the greatest jobs program since World War 2”. This is all so predictable, a cookie-cutter Democratic nominee’s response.

So far, Trump has failed to have the kind of stand-out moment that he really needs. There’s still an hour to go, but he is not winning on the Russia argument and there are a decreasing number of remaining openings available to mount a fightback.

Trump is simply unable to stick to a script. He did well in the first 30 minutes. Then he just goes back to doing Trump.

Getting very tired of Hillary Clinton’s opportunistic, cynical scaremongering about Russia. This is everything I detest about Clinton. This blog is no fan of Putin’s Russia, but Clinton is vastly over-hyping any possible threat Russia poses to the United States in her pursuit of power.

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6:31PM Las Vegas / 2:31AM London

Good response from Trump, calling out Hillary Clinton’s pivot and evasion. Wanting open trade and open borders is a perfectly legitimate political position, but if that is what Hillary Clinton really wants then she should have the courage to own her leaked statement and defend it. But she won’t, because she lacks principle.

If only the alternative wasn’t Donald Trump…

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6:28PM Las Vegas / 2:28AM London

Excellent! Chris Wallace brings up Clinton’s speech in which she revealed her dream of a “hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders”.

Clinton has no response – she immediately pivots to scaremongering about Russia, a country with a GDP less than Spain who are no longer the powerful Evil Empire of Reagan’s era. Nice pivot, but will Wallace allow her to get away with it?

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6:28PM Las Vegas / 2:28AM London

One of Trump’s weaknesses is that he cannot restrict himself to criticising Hillary Clinton, and veers off to criticise her husband as well:

Don't bring up what her husband said or did. Bring up how she supported and encouraged that behavior or policy @realDonaldTrump#debate

“We are a nation of immigrants and a nation of laws” says Hillary Clinton, whose nominating convention in Philadelphia featured lots of illegal immigrants standing on the convention stage being cheered for their lawbreaking.

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6:24PM Las Vegas / 2:24AM London

And Clinton naturally begins with an anecdote about a young girl worried about her illegal immigrant parents being deported, sentimentalising the issue and waxing about how she doesn’t want to “rip families apart”.

And of course she refers to “undocumented” rather than illegal immigrants. Because this is all part of the leftist agenda to control thinking through use of language, softening the language to make people tacitly accept – even celebrate – illegal immigration.

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6:22PM Las Vegas / 2:22AM London

Seems that Trump has brought four women who have lost children or relatives to murderers who turned out to be illegal immigrants. Looks like he is taking the “law and order” approach to the immigration issue rather than the jobs issue.

“We have to have strong borders; we have to keep the drugs out of the country .. We absolutely cannot give amnesty” says Trump.

“One of my first actions would be to take the drug lords – we’re going to get them out”, he continues. It’s that easy, apparently.

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6:22PM Las Vegas / 2:22AM London

Oh good, we’re on to immigration. At least Chris Wallace might distinguish between legal and illegal immigration in his questioning, unlike much of the left-leaning media.

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6:18PM Las Vegas / 2:18AM London

Good to see Chris Wallace putting Hillary Clinton in the spot as to how far she would go in support of abortion rights. Clinton, of course, is of the opinion that the foetus has no Constitutional rights. It’s easy to mop up votes by waxing about the “right to choose”. Much harder to grapple with the thorny questions to emerge from that blanket pronouncement.

Clinton gives a solid answer – clearly she has prepped well, knowing to expect some more socially conservative questions in this debate.

Trump talks about “ripping the baby out of the womb” in an abortion just prior to birth. Clinton says that the language Trump used is “unfortunate”. Yes, it is – because Trump didn’t sanitise the issue as Clinton so desperately wants to do.

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6:16PM Las Vegas / 2:16AM London

The US Libertarian Party, a refuge for many principled conservatives this election cycle, is providing some liberty-minded commentary of this debate as it proceeds:

Hats off to Chris Wallace. Ten minutes into the debate and we are talking about real, thorny issues and matters of policy relating to gun control and the Second Amendment. Neither of the first two debates managed to get so serious so quickly. That an anchor from “evil” Fox News has managed to do so should be a matter of shame for the others.

Dreher agrees:

Can we make Chris Wallace the moderator for all presidential debates henceforth?

Rod Dreher rightly warns that Donald Trump didn’t mention anything about religious freedom. And that, of course, is because deep down he doesn’t care about religious freedom. Because he isn’t a real conservative.

Note well, Trumpish Christians: Trump said not ONE WORD about religious liberty in this Supreme Court answer.

Interesting choice by Chris Wallace, diving into the debate by talking about the Supreme Court and judicial process. Neither candidate is able to come out swinging in dramatic fashion – will this more measured opening set the tone for the debate?

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6:08PM Las Vegas / 2:08AM London

Donald Trump predictably starts talking about how the Second Amendment is “under siege”, a reliable vote winner for Republicans. Note how the great federal gun seizure is always planned for “tomorrow” though. GOPers have been warning that Obama is coming for America’s guns since before he took the oath of office, and yet the Second Amendment remains intact. But Trump is happy to keep peddling an existential threat which is largely non-existent.

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6:07PM Las Vegas / 2:07AM London

Hillary Clinton immediately politicises the Supreme Court, saying that it should stand on the side of “the people” (meaning her leftist policies). I’m sorry, but no. The Supreme Court should stand on the side of the Constitution, not on the side of whatever basket of special interests Clinton decides to label “the people”.

Clinton sees the Supreme Court as an essential vehicle for continual, aggressive social change, far beyond anything that can be reasonably inferred from the text of the document and the original intent of the Founders. Not good.

Unfortunately, Clinton is able to score a point by pointing to Republican obstructionism over the nomination of Barack Obama’s appointment for Justice Scalia’s replacement.

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6:05PM Las Vegas / 2:05AM London

Chris Wallace’s first question is about the Supreme Court, and where both candidates “want to see the court take the country”. He follows on to ask whether they believe the Constitution is a living document or set in stone.

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6:04PM Las Vegas / 2:04AM London

And they have taken the stage. Both look serious – no handshake.

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6:01PM Las Vegas / 2:01AM London

David Harsanyi rages against the media’s moralising against Donald Trump in a piece for the Federalist. Harsanyi writes:

So forgive me if I don’t take liberal concern-trolling about the GOP’s wicked presidential choice too seriously. After all, even if Republicans had nominated the most qualified, competent, and chaste moderate in the existence of the republic, there still would be no #NeverHillary movement within the Democratic Party. No matter how many scandals were uncovered. No matter how many lies she told. What they’ve done is normalize Hillary’s behavior. Because Trump.

Actually, many of these same people treated a competent and ethically upright moderate like Mitt Romney just like they treat Trump. And even the most sexist-sensitive liberal would likely support a lecherous Bill Clinton over a virtuous Republican nominee. Because state power is the virtue. So spare us.

It’s been something to watch the media engage in this smug, self-satisfying, feigned outrage — much of it aimed at real Trump scandals, and plenty of it hyper-parsing and overreactions — after giving him nearly unlimited and uncritical airtime during the primaries to ensure his nomination for the ratings and to help Hillary.

It’s hard to disagree with some of this. While Donald Trump fully deserves enormous criticism for his behaviour any many of his ill-considered policies, much of the media’s excessive pearl-clutching has been more than a little cynical and contrived.

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5:59PM Las Vegas / 1:59AM London

Chris Wallace admonishing his audience not to “hoot and holler” as the candidates debate. It will be interesting to see if he enforces this rule across the board, or if he criticises Trump supporters for cheering while letting Clinton supporters scream to their hearts’ content.

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5:56PM Las Vegas / 1:56AM London

We’re about to get underway. The warm-up act is regaling the audience with a riff about how great an opportunity this debate is for the students at the University of Nevada, many of whom are helping out with logistics. Unless this debate is much better than the previous two, I think that this “opportunity” is a decidedly mixed blessing.

My wife and I are due to spend a few days in Las Vegas with family after Christmas – hopefully this debate will not reduce the city to a smoking crater in the ground.

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5:48PM Las Vegas / 1:48AM London

Is this the launch of Trump News Network?

This blog has recently speculated that Donald Trump’s intentions may have either shifted away from winning the presidency towards stoking up his supporters enough to turn them into loyal viewers of a future Trump cable news network.

As a serious attempt to build an election-winning coalition of voters or persuade a majority to abandon their doubts and embrace his “ideology”, Trump’s continued behaviour has been entirely counterproductive. But as a strategy to enthuse his most ardent supporters and drive a further wedge between them and all mainstream sources of news (even including Fox News) it has been a masterpiece. Journalists are now routinely booed at Trump rallies, while the candidate himself accuses the media of being part of an organised establishment plot to swing the election for Hillary Clinton.

Currently these voters are served only by the more fringe conservative media – sites such as World Net Daily, Breitbart, InfoWars and alt-right personalities like Paul Joseph Watson and Mike Cernovich. And while many of these outlets are professionalising their operations, there probably still exists a gap in the market for a well-funded, professional-looking television news network that looks like CNN but talks like Alex Jones.

And now there are further intriguing signs that the grounds may be being prepared for a move into the news media:

If you don’t like the coverage you are receiving from existing networks, just create your own. Putin and Berlusconi would be proud.

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5:42PM Las Vegas / 1:42AM London

And we’re back. Apologies for the pause. Semi-Partisan Politics is operating using rather ancient computing power, and things crawled to such a halt that an emergency reboot was necessary. Perhaps this is not a bad time to mention that if you find this blog’s coverage useful and entertaining, donations large and small are most welcome.

High on the list of upcoming necessary purchases is a laptop which doesn’t die when you try to open more than five tabs, and which doesn’t give off the heat of a nuclear reactor.

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5:03PM Las Vegas / 1:03AM London

Donald Trump’s debate prep guru has apparently thrown in the towel and given up trying to teach Trump the Unteachable.

Quite why it took Roger Ailes this long to realise that Donald Trump is a dud candidate is anybody’s guess – perhaps the man who taught George H. W. Bush to swagger is finally losing his touch, what with also having been drummed out of Fox News.

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4:57PM Las Vegas / 12:57AM London

When Rudy Giuliani has to act as your chief character witness, you know you’re in trouble:

The National Review paints a stark picture of the uphill battle faced by Donald Trump to win critical bellwether swing states like Ohio:

If Trump does win Ohio, he will achieve something many thought was impossible, winning a hard-fought swing state without any long-standing major campaign get-out-the-vote operation. It will obliterate everything every campaign professional has ever taught or learned about the importance of preparation.

On the plus side: Trump’s biggest fans would seemingly walk through fire for him, with an army (of indeterminate size) of volunteers willing to give up their own time and money to get people to the polls in an impromptu, uncoordinated get-out-the-vote operation. And while all comparisons between the UK’s vote for Brexit and the Donald Trump campaign are vastly overblown and often offensive, one common feature is that both anti-establishment insurgencies are buoyed by people whose political engagement seems to have gone from near zero to off-the-charts.

On the negative side (for Trump): Hillary Clinton has been waiting for this moment her entire life, and her professionalised get-out-the-vote operation will build on all of the success of the previous George W. Bush and Barack Obama political operations. Hillary Clinton has had political operatives laying the crucial groundwork in states since well before Donald Trump even threw his hat into the ring.

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4:10PM Las Vegas / 12:10AM London

Yes, the Clinton email scandal matters

In the wake of further Wikileaks email revelations from the hacked account of Clinton campaign apparatchik John Podesta, the National Review reminds us exactly why Clinton’s decision to use a private email server while serving as Secretary of State – and her subsequent evasiveness and liberty with the truth when held to account for her actions – is an entirely legitimate point of criticism.

Although it was ostensibly investigating Clinton and her State Department staff (many of whom had become her campaign staff), the Justice Department kept campaign officials in the loop about developments in Freedom of Information Act cases related to Clinton’s e-mails, and about administration efforts to delay and minimize disclosures. The DOJ worked with the Clinton team’s defense lawyers to restrict the FBI’s ability to ask key questions and examine critical evidence. It also declined to present the case to a grand jury, which the DOJ must do in order to subpoena critical evidence and indict culpable suspects. Instead, it gave the suspects immunity from prosecution and made other gratuitous concessions in order to acquire evidence the production of which could have been compelled.

Meanwhile, as the former secretary’s claims about never having sent or received classified information were exposed as lies — in fact, some of her e-mails contained information classified at the very highest levels of secrecy — the State Department colluded with Clinton aides to control the fallout. Newly disclosed FBI documents suggest that high-ranking State Department official Patrick Kennedy leaned on the FBI, and perhaps other agencies, to downgrade classification of Clinton’s e-mails (which might bolster her false denial of transmitting classified information) and to exploit Freedom of Information Act exemptions (which would allow the State Department to withhold disclosure of e-mails that would be politically harmful). This news should come as no surprise. FBI reports had previously indicated that State Department brass were pressuring career officials to change designations to minimize Clinton’s apparent misconduct.

While Kennedy and others were applying pressure from Foggy Bottom, Podesta sought help from a different source. Months ago, the State Department grudgingly acknowledged that Clinton and President Obama had exchanged at least 18 e-mails over Clinton’s private account, and FBI reports obtained by Congress revealed that Obama used an alias on those occasions. Prior to that revelation, Podesta suggested to Cheryl Mills, Clinton’s top aide at State and a key campaign adviser, that the White House invoke executive privilege to shield those exchanges from a congressional subpoena.

This isn’t partisan point-scoring. This is really bad. And while it may not have the telegenic allure of a good old fashioned sex scandal, it speaks to character every bit as much – and it probably speaks to Hillary Clinton’s likely governing style as president even more strongly.

In any other presidential election, Hillary Clinton’s actions with regard to her email would be immediately disqualifying. The fact that she remains preferable to a potential Donald Trump in this dismal election cycle is a reflection on just how bad of a candidate (and a person) he is, and is certainly not a reflection of any virtue or worthiness on Hillary Clinton’s part.

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3:56PM Las Vegas / 11:56PM London

Left-wing anxiety about the “Fox News debate”

The New York Times is paranoid that the final presidential debate, moderated by Chris Wallace of Fox News, will fail in his duty of impartiality:

A major topic at tonight’s presidential debate — maybe the first topic — will be “debt and entitlements,” according to Chris Wallace, the Fox News host who is moderating the debate.

I encourage you to watch for whether Wallace bases his questions on budget reality. Much of the public discussion of the national debt isn’t based on reality. It instead relies on facts that are badly outdated.

[..] Reasonable people can disagree about how much to emphasize the decline in the projected debt versus how much to emphasize the debt itself. But it’s simply irresponsible to talk about the debt while ignoring the enormous change.

Wallace has a reputation as a serious journalist, not a Fox News partisan like Sean Hannity, and I hope Wallace lives up to that reputation.

A reasonable concern? I suppose so. But Chris Wallace, like Shep Smith, is one of the good guys at Fox News, and I have no reason to doubt that he will chair the debate in a professional manner.

Besides, for impartiality to come into question would require the debate to actually focus on the detail of fiscal policy rather than devolving into glib soundbites and insults, a level of discourse which neither of the first two debates managed to reach.

What to expect from this final presidential debate? Who knows. Read ten different press previews and you’ll get ten different answers. But one thing is clear enough – if Donald Trump really wants to turn his campaign around and actually make a Hail Mary pass for victory rather than simply continuing to stoke the resentments of his supporters, he needs to do something extraordinary.

What precisely that “something extraordinary” looks like is difficult to say. He could try going after Hillary Clinton even harder – really hammering her on things like the email scandal and her relationship with Wall Street. But attacking harder is likely to just make him look deranged to more moderate voters, people who don’t necessarily buy the Hillary Is Satan schtick that his hardcore supporters love. The only way that attacking harder might benefit Trump is if he actually manages to achieve a moment of combustion and really make Clinton lose her temper or composure. And even then, it’s hard to see how Clinton injures her own prospects more than Trump.

As for Hillary Clinton, I fully expect her to spend most of the debate in cautious, defensive “home stretch” mode. Sure, we might see the odd flash of steel as she tears into Donald Trump’s character, particularly around the new sexual assault allegations (which conveniently emerged not when Trump was being a reality TV star, not when he was being a birther, not when he was fighting for the GOP nomination but only in the final month before the presidential election. I’m not saying the allegations are false, but I am saying that their convenient timing doesn’t do anything to allay Trump supporters’ paranoia that the whole thing is rigged against them).

But aside from a few more cheesy, canned one-liners and a few telegenic “shame on you” moments (which, don’t get me wrong, Trump fully deserves), I expect we will see Hillary Clinton behaving like the England football team protecting a one goal lead against Slovakia with 45 minutes left to play. Dull, uninspiring, and acceptable only if she doesn’t self-destruct and concede a last-minute equaliser.

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3:00PM Las Vegas / 11:00PM London

Yes, I’m blogging the final Trump v Clinton 2016 presidential debate. I’m doing it again. Goodness knows why – it’s certainly not for the benefit of my mental health or circadian rhythm. But it seems right and proper to see this thing through to the bitter end.

As always, I welcome your feedback and company as we watch along together. Please feel free to use the Comments feature, or contact/troll me on Twitter or by email.

You can read my live-blog of the first debate here and the second debate here. New readers – welcome, see my About page here for a brief bio.

Live Blog: Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton face off in the second of three high-stakes live televised debates

Debate Time: 8PM US Central Time / 2AM UK Time

Well, how to respond to all of that? Donald Trump clearly had the harder task going into this debate, having to defend his indefensible historic statements about women and try to staunch the bleeding of endorsements from prominent Republicans.

Trump certainly came out swinging, remaining combative throughout rather than flaming out in the second half as he did during the first debate. Donald Trump didn’t have the kind of breakout moment that he probably needed to really alter the trajectory of his campaign, but he probably succeeded in steadying the ship.

And in a way, that probably makes it harder for establishment Republicans trying to decide their next move. If Donald Trump had imploded, the momentum towards disowning Trump or even replacing him at the top of the presidential ticket would have gained traction. As it stands, they are probably stuck with him.

My initial assessment: if you disregard actual facts (as we now seem to do), Donald Trump probably had the better of this debate. He went on the (nuclear) attack, hit Hillary Clinton hard, gave his supporter base something to cheer about and managed to do enough incendiary things to bump the Trump Tapes story fallout down the news agenda. Hillary Clinton didn’t commit any significant gaffes and was more poised, but again there was nothing tremendously inspiring about her sales pitch for the presidency.

And that’s it, until 19th October at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, when the final presidential debate will take place.

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9:36PM St. Louis / 03:36AM London

Rod Dreher is looking ahead, and having declared a Donald Trump victory thinks that it will be very difficult for uneasy GOP elites to now disown their presidential candidate or continue rescinding endorsements:

So, Trump has won this debate, making it very, very hard on GOP elites to decide tomorrow if they're going to stick with him.

Oh, what’s the point of that last question? Getting each of the candidates to choke out something positive about the other when they clearly loathe one another adds nothing to our understanding of the issues.

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9:32PM St. Louis / 03:32AM London

A lot of conservative discontent (naturally) with Hillary Clinton’s remarks on the Supreme Court:

Essentially, Hillary wants SCOTUS to be another arm of the executive bureaucracy. #debate

Hillary Clinton wants new Supreme Court justices to have more “life experiences”. Sounds good as a glib soundbite, but is she right? Surely a good potential justice should understand and revere the constitution, and seek to be as neutral and fearless arbiter of constitutional questions as possible. The only reason one would want someone to bring their “life experience” to bear is if someone wants to usher in much more judicial activism, and have Supreme Court justices who bend their interpretations to fulfil a progressive ideological bias.

Donald Trump says that he favours candidates who “respect the Constitution”, which is the much better answer, even if his own constitutional literacy is near zero.

I don’t normally quote Michelle Malkin, but she’s not wrong in her observation here:

In her answer on picking SCOTUS judges, Hillary never mentioned the Constitution.#debate

Hillary Clinton put on the spot about her “deplorables” insult of Donald Trump’s supporters. She doesn’t seem very contrite.

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9:18PM St. Louis / 03:18AM London

It’s amazing how quickly we normalise all of the unprecedented things which have happened in these presidential debates, and indeed the campaign in general. One candidate standing mere feet from the other, pointing at them and declaring them a liar – even that they should be sent to jail.

Hillary Clinton seems unable to believe her luck at times – the broad smile on her face is reminiscent of the recent SNL skit, in which a jubilant Clinton (played by Kate McKinnon) keeps breaking out in smug laughter:

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9:14PM St. Louis / 03:14AM London

Trump’s whining about Hillary Clinton supposedly being allowed extra time to speak by the moderators is really starting to grate. Even if true, he should adopt the pose of a happy warrior, fighting under the circumstances in which he finds himself rather than railing against them. But of course that would require Trump to be something other than a thin-skinned sore loser.

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9:13PM St. Louis / 03:13AM London

Donald Trump loves to bring up ISIS at every turn, yet has remained curiously vague about his Secret Plan to tackle the terrorist quasi-state:

I would concede that Trump has been more combative and made some genuinely newsworthy attacks on Clinton. That will probably fire up his base, some of whom will have become dispirited after recent polls and the Trump Tapes revelation. It may rally the faithful, but will it turn the needle on Trump’s poll ratings and trajectory? I remain doubtful.

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9:01PM St. Louis / 03:01AM London

Hillary Clinton takes the opportunity to talk about her 30 years in politics, and hopefully set a rather more positive spin on it than Donald Trump has been doing.

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8:59PM St. Louis / 02:59AM London

Anderson Cooper gets an honest answer out of Donald Trump – that yes, he used his near $1bn loss in 1995 to offset his future federal income tax. To which the correct response is “so what?”. Trump followed the tax code. If deductions and loopholes exist, nobody should be rending their garments in horror when they are used.

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8:57PM St. Louis / 02:57AM London

Hillary Clinton: “Everything you’ve just heard from Donald Trump is not true. I’m sorry to have to keep saying this, but he does seem to live in an alternate reality”.

Clinton has been cool and competent for much of the debate thus far, even when under quite sensational and withering fire from Donald Trump. She has perfected the resigned, bemused but entertained smile as Trump rails on. Donald Trump, by contrast, is now gripping the chair in front of him and staring fixedly ahead – has he hit the wall again?

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8:55PM St. Louis / 02:55AM London

Donald Trump is comparing the GDP growth of China (a developing nation) with the United States (an advanced nation). Economically illiterate.

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8:54PM St. Louis / 02:54AM London

Donald Trump is now referring to himself in the third person.

Rather more successfully (from his perspective) he is making the point that somebody marinated in DC political culture for 30 plus years can scarcely claim to be an agent of change with any plausibility.

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8:53PM St. Louis / 02:53AM London

You can release your tax returns even if you are under audit by the IRS! Will nobody ever ask a determined follow-up question when Trump makes his now-standard evasion?

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8:52PM St. Louis / 02:52AM London

“I have no knowledge of Russia, I don’t know about the inner workings of Russia”, says Donald Trump. Reassuring, from someone who wants to be Commander in Chief.

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8:51PM St. Louis / 02:51AM London

Aaaand Donald Trump seizes on the opportunity to draw a contrast between Hillary Clinton and President Lincoln.

"Honest Abe never lied. That's the difference between Abraham Lincoln and you." Gotta hand it to Trump, that was good.

“If we were to start again, we might come up with a different system. But we have an employer-based system of health insurance” says Clinton, nicely summing up her political philosophy of late. Namely: don’t attempt anything ambitious, focus on grinding out incremental improvements.

The question of this debate: will the American people accept the promise of incremental progress this electoral cycle?

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8:33PM St. Louis / 02:33AM London

Some people seem to be prematurely predicting a Trump victory in this debate – not very wise, given the way that Trump lost energy and began flailing as the first debate dragged on:

Finally we are actually talking about policy – specifically the Affordable Care Act, or ObamaCare. Hillary Clinton details her assessment of the law’s flaws and a plan to address some of them, scorning Donald Trump’s plan to simply repeal the bill.

Trump, predictably, spends most of his time talking about how “disastrous” ObamaCare is, without detailing any policy prescriptions beyond its repeal.

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8:29PM St. Louis / 02:29AM London

Trump being more combative, openly mocking Clinton’s answers and pretty much calling her a criminal. He doesn’t have much to lose, so why the hell not?

And he takes a swipe at Anderson Cooper for not spending long enough on the subject of Hillary Clinton’s emails. Lobotomised Trump didn’t gain any traction, let’s see what flame-throwing Trump can do.

You know, forget the questions from the audience. Let them go at it for a while. This is what both have been itching to say to each other.

“There is no evidence that any classified information ended up in the wrong hands” – a classic Clintonian non-denial.

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8:26PM St. Louis / 02:26AM London

If Trump knows what is good for him, he needs to not let Hillary Clinton wriggle off the hook on the question of her homebrew email server and continued evasions / changed stories about that howler of a security lapse. At the first debate he barely pressed the issue. He needs to go for the kill this time – though perhaps not by openly threatening to send her to jail…

I have never seen a Presidential debate as personal or aggressive as this one.

Hillary Clinton directs people to the fact-checker on her website again, saying that she cannot possibly refute all of Trump’s falsehoods in real time.

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8:24PM St. Louis / 02:24AM London

Trump needs a game-changer in this debate, something that might actually somehow draw a line under the unmitigated disaster (though entirely predictable revelation) which was the Trump tapes. And so far we aren’t seeing it.

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8:21PM St. Louis / 02:21AM London

And Trump calls into question the legitimacy of Hillary Clinton’s victory in the Democratic primary, with the benefit of the Wikileaks email release. A fair point. It would be helpful to be whiter than white when going up against Trump. Sadly, Hillary Clinton is decidedly grey.

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8:20PM St. Louis / 02:20AM London

And Clinton gets in her crowd-pleasing line: “When you go low, I go high”.

The moderators, who admonished Trump’s supporters for cheering, allow Hillary Clinton’s supporters to cheer without comment.

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8:19PM St. Louis / 02:19AM London

Donald Trump asked by a questioner on social media whether he is still the same man from 10 years ago who made the derogatory remarks in the Trump Tapes, or whether the campaign has indeed “changed him” as he claims. Again, he apologises for the locker room talk, clearly hating every moment.

And then Trump hits back, talking about a rape victim whose alleged attacker was successfully defended in court by a young Hillary Clinton. Trump contrasts his words with Clinton’s supposed action – and the audience applauds. Could this be the gloves coming off?

Whataboutism In Our Time. "Bill Clinton was worse!" Hillary looks like she's sending fire out of her eyes.

Hillary Clinton calls for America to signal its virtue to the world by rejecting Donald Trump. Finally an instance of virtue signalling which this blog does not automatically reject out of hand.

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8:13PM St. Louis / 02:13AM London

Now Hillary Clinton gets to weigh in on the Trump tapes.

“I never questioned their fitness to serve” says Clinton of past GOP presidential nominees, but not this time.

“He has said the video doesn’t represent who he is. But it is clear to anyone who heard it that it represents exactly who he is. Because we have seen throughout this campaign him insult women, rate women … embarrass women. We saw him, after the first debate, spending nearly a week denigrating a former Miss Universe in the most harsh terms. So yes, this is exactly who Donald Trump is”.

Ouch.

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8:11PM St. Louis / 02:11AM London

And Anderson Cooper goes in for the kill, pointing out that Donald Trump’s “locker room talk” amounts to an admission of sexual assault. Somehow, twenty seconds later Donald Trump is talking about wars and trade. Anyone looking for an expression of genuine contrition will be disappointed.

Cooper: “Did you kiss women without their consent?”

Trump: “I have great respect for women” – and then pivots back to making America safe again.

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8:09PM St. Louis / 02:09AM London

Trump doing his usual masterful job describing, restating and restating again the problems which supposedly ail America. And as usual, his solutions consist of “doing things that haven’t been done” – with the juicy detail missing.

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8:07PM St. Louis / 02:07AM London

Bright start from Clinton, pivoting quickly away from question about the vulgar tone of the campaign to talk about her policies. A potential punch pulled by Clinton?

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8:06PM St. Louis / 02:06AM London

Ooh, no handshake as the candidates take the stage. That will get the cable news channels aflutter, saves them from having to analyse boring points of policy.

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8:05PM St. Louis / 02:05AM London

As the debate gets underway, Martha Raddatz reminds us that all of the audience members at this town hall debate are currently undecided voters from the St. Louis area. One wonders how anyone can possibly be undecided in this election campaign – rather calls to mind this blog’s take on undecided voters.

The "undecided" voters at tonight's #debate were plucked from a Siberian submarine that has never surfaced to sea level.

And the moderators, Anderson Cooper and Martha Raddatz, have taken the stage. We’re about to kick off.

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7:55PM St. Louis / 01:55AM London

I know Washington University in St. Louis, have spent a significant amount of time on the campus and even sat in on some of the classes. It is a great institution. However, the president of the WashU Students Union, now citing Lincoln as he tries to set an appropriate tone for the coming debate, is quite probably setting our hopes too high with his ringing paean to American democracy.

There is nothing poetic or praiseworthy about the example America is setting to the world in this presidential election campaign.

As it stands, current polls are in favor of Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, even before #TrumpTapes roiled the Republican party. The New York Times election forecast has Clinton ahead of Trump by 4 percentage points, at 45 percent versus 41 percent, with an 82 percent chance of her winning the presidency.FiveThirtyEight’s forecast also indicates the Democratic nominee has an 82 percent chance of winning, with Clinton commanding 329.6 electoral votes to Trump’s 208.3, as well as 48.8 percent of the popular vote versus Trump’s 43.2 percent.

So rather less close than the polls stood ahead of the first presidential debate…

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7:47PM St. Louis / 01:47AM London

I’m not going to go on a massive Social Justice tangent here, but it is telling that self-identified progressives love to support every victim group under the sun, unless they happen to support or benefit a conservative cause, in which case they are either evil or being used as pawns:

I am disgusted by how these women are being used. Putting them out for a feeding frenzy after decades of pain raises bile. #debate

The fact that we are even talking about the possibility of one of the two major party presidential nominees dropping out less than a month before the election is testament to the recklessness and democratic self harm of nominating somebody like Donald Trump:

On phone w/ person close to Trump. Says there is talk of a Pence-Carson ticket if Trump drops out. But person doesn't expect Trump to quit.

Of course, if the Clinton email scandal had ignited a bit more we could well be making the same point about the Democratic Party nominee.

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7:26PM St. Louis / 01:26AM London

Chris Matthews on MSNBC just compared Donald Trump’s likely approach to this debate to a suicide bomber strapping on an explosive vest and preparing to bring the whole building down on everyone – a rather crass comparison, even if it is evocative of the desperation of a man with his political back against the wall.

As well as the BBC feed, I will be watching along on MSNBC here (for more partisan pro-Clinton coverage) as well as CNN. MSNBC have veteran Clinton political operative James Carville on as a guest, which should be entertaining if nothing else.

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7:20PM St. Louis / 01:20AM London

Donald Trump, unable to resist hitting back and fighting fire with fire when provoked, has decided to make sexual assault a theme of this utterly depressing presidential election. And in the hour before the debate is due to begin at Washington University in St. Louis, Trump decided to hold a press conference with four women – including Juanita Broaddrick – who accuse Bill Clinton of sexual violence.

In a dramatic move less than 90 minutes before the second presidential debate on Sunday night, Trump made a surprise move in St. Louis in a desperate attempt to shift the focus from his own bragging of sexually aggressive behavior by appearing with four women who have alleged they were victimized by Bill and Hillary Clinton.

It was the first shot in an increasingly ugly battle expected to play out on national television later in the evening before tens of millions of Americans.

Trump, flanked by the four women, ignored shouted questions by a small group of reporters ushered in for the photo-op, as he introduced them. “These four very courageous women have asked to be here and it was our honor to help them,” Trump said, “and I think they’re each going to make an individual short statement.”

And so they did. Whether this indirect nuclear attack on Hillary Clinton pays off for Donald Trump remains to be seen.

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7:17PM St. Louis / 01:17AM London

Rod Dreher makes the important point that to fully-committed Trump supporters, these revelations will not be a deal-breaker. They will support their man regardless of the Trump Tapes or any future revelations, no matter how scandalous:

'What wd he have to do to get you not to vote for him?" I asked. "Kill someone?" Shd sd she wd still vote for him even then. Seriously. 2/3

This debate of course takes place in the aftermath of shocking, unexpected and totally out of character revelations that the Republican presidential nominee is not the humble, politely-spoken, women-respecting saint of a man we all unanimously believed him to be prior to the release of certain audio recordings from 2005.

Amid all of the media outrage (much of which is justifiable) there are a couple of nagging questions – like whether Trump’s words, however coarse and unbecoming to someone seeking high public office, are really worse than known physical transgressions by presidents past (Kennedy and Clinton come to mind) who retain the respect of the establishment. Expect to see Donald Trump use some variant of this discussion as he tries to wriggle off the hook during what will undoubtedly be a barrage of hostile questions from the Town Hall debate audience and attacks from Hillary Clinton

Received wisdom seems to be that Trump will try to paint a false equivalence and suggest that Hillary Clinton was somehow complicit in the supposed sex crimes of her husband. It won’t work as a tactic, and if Trump tries it then he will only succeed in making this presidential election campaign even more tawdry, shameful and sensationalist than it already is. Far better from a purely tactical standpoint that he tries to choke out the words “I apologise” early on, and then try to keep his head in the game for more than the first 45 minutes of this debate.

Of far more interest to this blog has been watching the reaction of big-name Republicans who previously endorsed Donald Trump, either enthusiastically (Rudy Giuliani, Chris Christie) or through gritted teeth (John McCain, Ted Cruz). To some extent, this blog appreciates the difficult situation in which Republicans find themselves, confronted with a candidate overwhelmingly chosen by their party base but anathema to their own values. And when covering British politics, this blog has firmly taken the side of the Labour Party base over the centrist interloper MPs in the parliamentary party.

But this situation is different. Semi-Partisan Politics supports Jeremy Corbyn and his left-wing takeover of Labour because no matter how outdated their vision, it is they who more closely resemble anything like the socialist principles on which the Labour Party was founded. The centrists – as two leadership elections in the space of a year have plainly revealed to us – stand for absolutely nothing beyond winning and holding power.

However, in the case of American conservatism it is Donald Trump and his Republican grassroots supporters who have drifted away from core Conservative principle, replacing it with their own zesty blend of authoritarianism, protectionism and proud ignorance. To be sure, the GOP elite and mainstream conservatives brought this fate on themselves by governing in a self-interested way and continually betraying those voters who have defected to Trump in sheer exasperation (or despair for their futures). But nonetheless, if one holds that the Republican Party is supposed to be the small-c conservative party of American politics then supporting Trump is indefensible.

And yet many household name Republicans have willingly thrown their arms around Trump, despite knowing who and what he is. The revelations from the Trump Tapes are hardly surprising – anybody who was genuinely shocked that Trump holds demeaning and unreconstructed attitudes towards women is so naive that they probably belong in an institution of some kind. And while some braver Republicans have withdrawn their foolish endorsements of Trump, far more have shamefully fudged the issue and hunkered down until the media storm passes, hoping to then be able to continue cheerleading for Trump without being sullied by charges of sexism.

To this blog, that is an unforgivable cop-out. Either defend the man you endorsed (maybe condemning his comments but going on record that you don’t think that such character flaws disqualify him from the presidency) or rescind the endorsement. Trying to keep a low profile in order to benefit from any eventual outcome is cowardly.

Trump’s turbulent campaign, on display here at Sunday night’s second presidential debate with Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, has damaged far more than his own White House prospects. It threatens to diminish an entire generation of Republican leaders who stood by him and excused his behavior after attacks against women, the disabled, Latino immigrants, Muslim Americans, Syrian refugees, prisoners of war, Gold Star parents and others.

“There is nobody who holds any position of responsibility who in private conversations views Donald Trump as equipped mentally, morally and intellectually to be the president of the United States,” said Steve Schmidt, a veteran GOP strategist. “But scores of Republican leaders have failed a fundamental test of moral courage and political leadership in not speaking truth to the American people about what is so obvious.”

[..] Wilson fears that the legacy of Trump’s campaign could haunt Republican candidates for many election cycles to come, just as Democrats in the 1980s and 1990s were hurt by their ties to former president Jimmy Carter and iconic liberals like Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (Mass.).

“This is going to last forever,” Wilson said. “For years now, Democrats will be able to roll out TV ads and say, ‘When John Smith says today he’s for a brighter future, remember who he stood by: Donald Trump. He stood by Donald Trump’s misogyny, racism, sexism and stupidity.’ ”

The mere fact this debate is going to focus in large part on Donald Trump’s decade-old X-rated language (and long standing, long-excused character flaws) is depressing enough. But given that he begins with such a handicap it is difficult to predict anything other than a second Hillary Clinton victory, this time on public perception as well as technical points.

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4:55PM St. Louis / 10:55PM London

Welcome to the Semi-Partisan Politics live blog of the second 2016 presidential debate between Hillary Clinton (Democrat) and Donald Trump (Republican).

Yes, I’m braving the insomnia and doing it all over again.

I’m out of Red Bull but I have a constant stream of coffee brewing, and will be glad of your company as I live-blog the second debate. Please feel free to use the Comments, or contact/troll me on Twitter or by email.

Read my live-blog of the first debate here. New readers – welcome, see my About page here for a brief bio.

Live Blog: Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton face off in the first of three high-stakes live televised debates

Debate Time: 9PM East Coast / 2AM UK Time

CNN pundits seem very quick to call this debate for Hillary Clinton. And yes, she won on points (as we knew she probably would). But in terms of what the pundits say vs what the country feels, I can’t help but think that the media class might be getting out ahead of the country, rather like the British media declared the 2014 Nigel Farage v Nick Clegg European Union debates a victory for Nick Clegg, and then had to eat their words as post-debate polling showed the British people considered it a resounding triumph for Farage.

As I said about 45 minutes ago:

To me, this seems very much within the bounds of a normal presidential debate. Sure, it might have been a bit more tetchy in places than Obama-McCain or Obama-Romney, but visually and in terms of subject matter this is relatively unexceptional.

And that is bad, bad, bad for Hillary Clinton. Clinton needs Trump to blow his top and say something really incendiary, insensitive or uncommonly stupid. And he isn’t rising to the bait. Clinton may have had a couple of good pre-canned zingers that Trump lacked, but he has had her on the ropes a couple of times, too. At no point as Trump been stumped for words, and at no point was he pinned down on what people commonly perceive to be his weak points: his taxes, climate change, trade.

Clinton did become more effective during the final 30 minutes, which her campaign will be very relieved about. And did she manage to rile Donald Trump? Yes – but no more than the country is used to seeing after his tussles with Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz.

I’ll do a fuller analysis later (bed beckons now…) but my gut says that this was a victory for Hillary Clinton on points, but a score draw in terms of public reception. Time will soon tell.

And that’s me signing off for tonight. Many thanks for following along!

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10:42PM New York / 03:42AM London

On points, probably, yes. But a points victory is not what Hillary Clinton really needed.

Well that was a pretty clear win for Clinton. Probably won all three sections in my opinion. #debates#Debates2016

Hillary Clinton rightly calls out Donald Trump’s attempt to switch focus from looks (Lester Holt’s original question) to stamina. Hillary Clinton goes for the jugular, rattling off some of the many ways in which Donald Trump has publicly and crassly disrespected women.

Clinton takes him over her knee over and over and over about his chronic misogyny

Clinton: “A man who can be provoked by a tweet should not have his fingers anywhere near the nuclear codes”.

Quite.

Donald Trump responds by reiterating his statement that NATO members that do not pay their fair share should lose US protection. Now, the free rider problem is real and this will go down well with a number of Americans, but it doesn’t suggest the world’s greatest grasp of realpolitik.

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10:25PM New York / 03:25AM London

This has been the first real, significant chink in Donald Trump’s Teflon armour tonight:

I HAVE THE BEST TEMPERAMENT! ASK SEAN HANNITY! WHY WON'T ANYONE CALL SEAN?

Trump: “By far my strongest asset is my temperament. I have a winning temperament. I know how to win”.

Really?

Okay, perhaps the wheels are starting to come off Donald Trump’s performance in a way that might be favourable to Hillary Clinton, now. She rightly pushes back on Trump’s fanciful plans for NATO by schooling the debate audience on Article 5.

"I haven't given a lot of thought to NATO," says Trump. But he wants to be POTUS. Got it.

Trump really going to the wall denying that he ever supported the Iraq war – it’s all a figment of the mainstream media’s imagination, apparently. I’m not sure that this is really the hill Donald Trump wants to die trying to storm.

But apparently America needs only to “call up Sean Hannity”, and the Fox News presenter will then provide a cast-iron alibi for Trump…

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10:20PM New York / 03:20AM London

So Donald Trump wants to use NATO to “knock the hell out of ISIS” now? Not sure how keen the allies will be to embark on a vague, open-ended commitment like that…

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10:17PM New York / 03:17AM London

Hillary Clinton rightly taking Donald Trump to task for his extreme and unconstitutional plan to halt immigration of all Muslims into the United States. I’m surprised she didn’t go stronger on this – where was the fire, where was the outrage? Trump was allowed to wriggle free with a rambling rebuttal.

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10:14PM New York / 03:14AM London

Donald Trump’s fair point about the vacuum in which ISIS formed is rather undermined by his false statement that he initially opposed the Iraq war, and his glib plan to “take the oil” in payment for America’s troubles.

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10:10PM New York / 03:10AM London

Hillary Clinton doing her best to link Donald Trump to Vladimir Putin. Clinton’s hawkishness on Russia is rather offputting. While America’s national interests must absolutely be defended robustly and while Russia’s backsliding into anti-democratic authoritarianism is extremely troubling, Russia is an economically diminished country with a relatively shrivelled military, more concerned with defending its shrinking field of influence than truly grand pretensions on the world stage. Let’s not make more of the threat they pose than is accurate.

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10:05PM New York / 03:05AM London

Good to see Hillary Clinton rake Donald Trump over the coals for his tawdry birtherism. Despite his attempts to pin the genesis on people in the Clinton ’08 campaign, Donald Trump was the unapologetic face of American birtherism for over a year, keeping incredibly dodgy company and stirring very ugly sentiments.

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10:00PM New York / 03:00AM London

Good line from Clinton: “I think Mr. Trump just accused me of preparing for this debate. And yes, I did. And you know what else I prepared for? I also prepared for being president of this country. And I think that’s a good thing”.

That effective zinger won a small audience applause.

And another: “Well, just listen to what you heard.”

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9:59PM New York / 02:59AM London

My thoughts so far, two thirds of the way into the debate with one hour gone and thirty minutes to go. To me, this seems very much within the bounds of a normal presidential debate. Sure, it might have been a bit more tetchy in places than Obama-McCain or Obama-Romney, but visually and in terms of subject matter this is relatively unexceptional.

And that is bad, bad, bad for Hillary Clinton. Clinton needs Trump to blow his top and say something really incendiary, insensitive or uncommonly stupid. And he isn’t rising to the bait. Clinton may have had a couple of good pre-canned zingers that Trump lacked, but he has had her on the ropes a couple of times, too. At no point as Trump been stumped for words, and at no point was he pinned down on what people commonly perceive to be his weak points: his taxes, climate change, trade.

Hillary Clinton has 30 minutes to make Donald Trump seem more unacceptable than Trump has made himself appear throughout the Republican primary process and the general election campaign so far.

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9:55PM New York / 02:55AM London

Hillary Clinton: “If you are too dangerous to fly, you are too dangerous to have a gun”.

Neat catchphrase, but ignores the fact that there is no due process when it comes to putting someone on a watch list. People will therefore be denied their Second Amendment rights under the Constitution – so more thorny an issue than it looks.

Nonetheless, Trump agrees in principle.

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9:50PM New York / 02:50AM London

Trump actually making a fair point on the need for better police/community relationships, and the costs of police withdrawal from inner city communities.

I lived in Chicago – a real Democratic Party rotten borough – back in 2010-2011, just as things were about to tip into the current violent lawlessness. Gun control and wall-to-wall Democrat control are not tremendously good for violent crime rates.

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9:48PM New York / 02:48AM London

Donald Trump predictably takes a more “law and order” stance, and gets to brag about his endorsement from the Fraternal Order of Police.

Trump: “We have to protect our inner cities because African American communities are being decimated by crime”.

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9:45PM New York / 02:45AM London

A change of pace now, as Lester Holt moves the debate on to the subject of recent police shootings.

Clinton :”Everyone should be respected by the law, and everyone should respect the law. Right now that’s not the case in a lot of our neighbourhoods”.

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9:43PM New York / 02:43AM London

Trump, explaining his business bankruptcies and refusals to pay suppliers: “I take advantage of the laws of the nation”.

Well, it won’t hurt him among his existing supporters, not sure how that semi-amoral approach will register with the broader country though…

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9:41PM New York / 02:41AM London

Clinton: “I’ve met dishwashers, painters, architects … who you refused to pay when they finished the work you asked them to do. We have an architect in the audience who designed one of the clubhouses at your golf courses … Do the thousands of people you have stiffed in your businesses not deserve some kind of apologies?”

Good from Clinton, attacking Trump’s unscrupulous business practices.

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9:40PM New York / 02:40AM London

Hillary keeps pounding away, but Donald Trump keeps deploying his “bemoaning the state of America” evasion, and by and large getting away with it:

Hillary beating up Trump on hiding his finance stuff — first time she's won something tonight. "There's something he's hiding."

And Hillary Clinton deals with her email “mistake”. She doesn’t sound very contrite, and Donald Trump rightly hammers her for it: “That wasn’t a mistake, it was deliberate … And I think it’s disgraceful”.

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9:35PM New York / 02:35AM London

And Trump pivots away more successfully by raising the subject of Hillary Clinton’s emails. This raises a loud cheer from pro-Trump factions in the audience, and an admonition to the audience from Lester Holt.

Hillary Clinton: “Well, I think you’ve just seen a classic example of bait and switch”.

And proceeds to goad Trump: “Maybe he’s not as rich as he says he is. Maybe he is not as charitable … We know he owes about $650 million to foreign banks. Or maybe he doesn’t want you to know he has paid nothing in federal taxes … And that means zero for troops, zero for health, zero for schools”.

Ouch.

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9:32PM New York / 02:32AM London

Aaand Lester Holt asks Donald Trump about his tax returns.

Trump tries to wriggle off the hook by repeating his “I’m under audit” line, immediately pivots away to how America is being “ripped off by every single country in the world”. This is a rather desperate evasion, and if Lester Holt wants to avoid the criticisms levelled at Matt Lauer after the Commander in Chief forum he will ask the question again and demand a better response…

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9:29PM New York / 02:29AM London

Clinton: “I have a feeling by the end of this debate I’ll have been blamed for everything!”

And her first snide put-down of Trump: “Sure, let’s keep saying crazy things”

First stunt of the debate – Hillary Clinton has supposedly turned the front page of her campaign website into a “fact-checker” to call out Trump’s lies. And so she has:

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9:22PM New York / 02:22AM London

Agree with him or not, Trump sounds a lot more confident and almost righteously angry when he is inveighing against NAFTA. And he actually has Clinton on the ropes now. “You called it the gold standard, you called it the finest trade deal you’d ever seen”.

Facts aside, Clinton has a habit of taking credit for things that happened during the Bill Clinton administration or during her term as New York senator while ducking blame for any areas where she is criticised. Was she “in power” then or not? Trump may be on to something by trying to pin Clinton down on this.

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9:19PM New York / 02:19AM London

Good from Clinton – “Let’s not assume trade is the only challenge we have in the economy”. True. Trump can often sound like a one-trick pony on this.

9:09 p.m. Trump begins by denying reality – that jobs are leaving the U.S. in droves. He has almost nothing substantive to counter Clinton’s policies, except a massive tax cut. A weak start for the Donald.

If we were scoring on points, I would agree. But Clinton could well win this debate on points, and still lose (or draw, which would be the same thing). Trump just needs to appear calm and acceptable.

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9:16PM New York / 02:16AM London

So protectionism, basically. That’s what Donald Trump is advocating.

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9:13PM New York / 02:13AM London

Donald Trump on his politest behaviour: “In all fairness to ‘Secretary Clinton’ – is that okay? I want you to be very happy”.

I hate to say it, but so far Trump looks quite…presidential?

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9:12PM New York / 02:12AM London

Hillary Clinton seems to have digressed into a lengthy explanation of the process of silk screen printing…

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9:11PM New York / 02:11AM London

“Trumped up trickle down” – really, Hillary?

Not that Donald Trump offered anything more meaty for Hillary Clinton to sink her teeth into, policy-wise.

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9:10PM New York / 02:10AM London

Donald Trump begins by doing what Trump always does when asked a question – he spends 90% of the time restating and rephrasing the question in various ways, bemoaning the state of America. “We need to stop our jobs from being stolen from us, we need to stop our companies leaving the United States”. And he runs out his opening 2 minutes without having to offer a real answer beyond “reducing taxes tremendously”. But it’s going to be “a beautiful thing to watch”, apparently.

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9:09PM New York / 02:09AM London

Decent opening statement from Clinton – gracious to Donald Trump, spoke firmly but in platitudes about the nature of the economic challenge. A steady start.

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9:06PM New York / 02:06AM London

So we begin with job creation. I’m not sure either candidate has a good answer to this. Easy to talk about “building an economy that works for everyone”, much harder to talk about how to embrace globalisation while helping displaced people and low-paid workers adapt to it.

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9:01PM New York / 02:01AM London

However this debate goes, one person who will likely get no thanks is moderator Lester Holt. Any perceived favouritism toward Trump or Clinton, however slight (or imaginary) will be immediately jumped on:

How long until Donald Trump declares victory? Not long, predicts Tim Stanley. Indeed, there is speculation that Donald Trump may enter the post-debate spin room himself to help things along in that particular regard…

Prediction: Trump will be declared the winner by Trump. Probably five minutes in. #debatenight

We seem to be into the self-congratulatory grandstanding part of tonight’s programme, where the organisers congratulate themselves for having successfully wrangled two egotistical and highly risk-averse presidential candidates onto a stage where they have almost nothing significant to gain and everything to lose.

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8:40PM New York / 01:40AM London

This from Ben Shapiro sums up the low bar we seem to have set for both candidates:

Will Trump string together a sentence with more than five words? Will Hillary slip into a coma? FIND OUT TONIGHT! https://t.co/p1BZLeg4EQ

Wow, CNN leaking some last-minute spin from unnamed Trump campaign sources, suggesting that they fear their candidate has not prepared enough and *isn’t ready*. This is some masterful expectations-lowering going on here, the culmination of a weeks-long effort to talk down Trump’s chances. At this rate, he’ll be declared the victor if he manages not to fall down.

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8:20PM New York / 01:20AM London

Just a reminder that as we go into this first presidential debate the polls are essentially tied. From Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight:

Well, folks, this is getting tight. Donald Trump is in his strongest-ever position in FiveThirtyEight’s polls-plus forecast, which gives him a 46 percent chance of winning the election. Trump’s chances are about the same, 45 percent, according our polls-only forecast, his best standing since it showed him with a 50 percent chance in the midst of his convention bounce.

Our models have been on the move toward Trump for roughly six weeks. But with dozens of polls coming out over the past few days, he’s no longer much of an underdog at all. Hillary Clinton leads narrowly — by 1.5 percentage points — in our projection of the popular vote. But polling weakness in states that Clinton probably needs to win, particularly Colorado and Pennsylvania, makes the Electoral College almost even.

It is hard to think of any other plausible Democratic Party candidate who could be making such a struggle of running against Donald J Trump. Mostly because were it not for Trump’s sky-high unfavourables, Hillary Clinton’s unfavourables would also be setting a dismal record.

Donald Trump’s charitable foundation has received approximately $2.3 million from companies that owed money to Trump or one of his businesses but were instructed to pay Trump’s tax-exempt foundation instead, according to people familiar with the transactions.

In cases where he diverted his own income to his foundation, tax experts said, Trump would still likely be required to pay taxes on the income. Trump has refused to release his personal tax returns. His campaign said he paid income tax on one of the donations, but did not respond to questions about the others.

That gift was a $400,000 payment from Comedy Central, which owed Trump an appearance fee for his 2011 “roast.”

The suggestion is that by diverting income through his “charitable” foundation, Trump may have avoided paying income tax – something we will likely never know until (if) Donald Trump finally deigns to release his tax returns.

While Trump’s foundation trickery is of the more overt kind, the ethical concerns surrounding the Clinton Foundation are hazier. This blog’s conclusion:

The point, I suppose, is that a family charitable foundation is a perfectly legitimate option for an ex-president and his family who intend to quit the political game after leaving office. But when this is not the case – when Hillary was pursuing senatorial ambitions and later becoming Secretary of State – conflicts of interest are inevitably going to occur.

When one is as rich and well-connected as the Clintons, acquiring more money becomes of limited interest. Instead, the reason for getting up in the morning after having left the White House often becomes the building of power, influence and legacy – and, of course, keeping the family in the style of living to which they have become accustomed (i.e. minimal contact with ordinary people). A family foundation accomplishes all of these objectives wonderfully. But when one or more members of the family are still politically active it is highly questionable.

It would have been far better, when there are still active political careers in play, for the Clintons to have put ego aside and thrown their support behind an alternative, existing foundation – much like Warren Buffett is giving away much of his wealth to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, recognising that it makes little sense to build up his own philanthropic expertise from scratch and create all the overheads which come from a second foundation when a perfectly good one already exists.

Why did the Clintons not take the Warren Buffett approach? Three reasons – ego, power and prestige. It is great that the Clintons are philanthropically active. But nearly all of their philanthropic work is done through the Clinton Foundation ($1 million to the foundation in 2015 and just $42,000 to another charity), meaning they want to do charity on their terms. It is a few distinct shades further away from pure altruism, and more to do with continuing to exercise power after the White House.

When Bill Clinton’s presidency ended in 2001, like a shark he had to keep swimming or surely die. Sitting at home in front of the television was never an option. But neither was Bill Clinton about to show up to work for Bill and Melinda Gates, or Habitat for Humanity. He wanted the benefits of his charitable work to accrue to him and his family, not to the Gates family or anyone else. And so the Clinton Foundation was born.

And since the Clintons choose to conduct philanthropic activities on their own terms and through their own foundation, in a way which aggrandises the Clinton family name and brings them power and influence, it is perfectly reasonable to ask questions about any other “fringe benefits” which Hillary Clinton pursued while holding the immeasurably valuable bargaining chip of being a senior part of the Obama administration. And when there is smoke, it is not churlish or unreasonable for journalists to have lots of questions about these activities.

In short, there is billowing smoke on both sides. But Trump could very easily go a long way to proving his probity regarding the Trump Foundation by actually releasing his tax returns.

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7:56PM New York / 12:56AM London

Mike Pence on CNN trying and failing to make the case that Donald Trump epitomises the American Spirit. Eventually the moderator, pitying him, moves on to another question.

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7:48PM New York / 12:48AM London

It’s worth remembering the context in which this presidential debate is taking place – a stultifying new age of censorship, in which infantilised young students and pandering professors seek to cocoon themselves in an ideological bubble in which Bad Ideas (generally conservatives ones) are prohibited.

Hofstra University has posted a “trigger warning” sign to warn students about the potentially disturbing content that may be discussed during Monday night’s presidential debate.

According to CBS New York reporter Tony Aiello, a sign inside of the student center at Hofstra reads, “Trigger warning: The event conducted just beyond this sign may contain triggering and/or sensitive material. Sexual violence, sexual assault, and abuse are some topics mentioned within this event. If you feel triggered, please know there are resources to help you.”

Utterly pathetic – though it should be noted that this particular trigger warning relates to a previous event which took place on campus, and not the presidential debate.

You can read this blog’s extensive coverage of the trigger warning / safe space / social justice phenomenon here.

This is turning out to be a great interview with Bernie Sanders on CNN right now. The vapid talking head / presenter keeps trying to switch the focus to style and appearance rather than policy content and character, and Sanders keeps swatting down that assertion.

“But we all know that style matters a lot –” says the presenter, trying to drag the interview onto the petty, personality-based politics which is CNN’s only real strength.

“No, no, I don’t agree” says Senator Sanders, sticking to his guns.

This is partly a self-fulfilling prophecy. The more that pundits and cable news channels obsess over style and appearances, the more they will be magnified in importance – and vice versa.

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7:22PM New York / 12:22AM London

“This is not a night of entertainment. This is not the Superbowl, this is not the World Series…” – Senator Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton’s defeated Democratic primary foe, making what should be (but sadly isn’t) a very obvious point on CNN right now.

This reference to Hillary Clinton’s description of half of Trump supporters as “deplorables” should serve as a timely reminder that sneering disdain and condescension toward Donald Trump supporters during the upcoming debate will only harden Trump’s support and win Clinton no new fans:

Should the wisdom of the markets comfort Democrats, non-authoritarian Republicans, and other people who are fond of life on Earth as we know it? No, it probably shouldn’t. Betting markets do not appear to have any special knowledge. The prediction markets badly missed the outcome of the Brexit vote. Markets also gave Trump less than a 50 percent chance of securing his party’s nomination in February, and less than a 60 percent chance as recently as April. In both of these cases, prediction markets diverged from what the polling suggested, and the polling proved correct. The other commonality between these events is that conventional wisdom reflected the preferences of social and economic elites, who refused to take seriously beliefs held by very few people in their own circles.

So what do the polls say? FiveThirtyEight, Silver’s site, gives Clinton a 51.5 percent chance of winning. The Upshot, the New York Times calculator, gives her a 69 percent chance. (Both forecasts are based mostly on polling results.) Silver’s forecast makes Clinton the equivalent of a football team that is a 1-point favorite. The Upshot’s forecast makes her the equivalent of a 5.5-point favorite.

If your football team is either a 1-point favorite or a 5.5-point favorite, then you should be deeply concerned about the chance of losing. If the outcome is not a football game but the chance that the Executive branch falls under the control of a bigoted, uninformed, dictator-admiring man-child, you should be more than concerned. You should be freaked out.

Jeremy Corbyn. Brexit. Who is still going to offer swaggering, cast-iron certainties given this year of huge and unexpected political turmoil?

Trump has never been interested in outlining policy proposals in any detail during debates, and he isn’t going to start now. That gives him a slight advantage in that most voters don’t especially care about policy specifics, and tend not to react well to candidates that are absorbed with them. If there is one thing Trump knows about, it is how to perform on television, so I don’t know that it matters so much that this will be the first head-to-head debate he has done as a candidate. Clinton has considerably more experience with these formats from both her Senate and presidential campaigns, but she has never faced off against an opponent quite as shameless and unconventional as Trump. Clinton probably has the edge in being able to give the canned, scripted answers that these events demand. Trump’s willingness to say almost anything means that he may surprise her with an attack or proposal that she isn’t anticipating.

The debate “topics” that have been announced in advance are very vague, but I assume “securing America” will be the section of the debate related to foreign policy and national security. Because of her tenure at the State Department, this is the section during which Clinton will be expected to dominate Trump, who knows little and understands even less about the rest of the world. However, because of her record of poor judgment on foreign policy, especially as it relates to military intervention, Clinton will be vulnerable to attacks that Trump won’t hesitate to make regarding the Iraq and Libyan wars. Trump may be a lousy messenger for these criticisms, but they are attacks that she was mostly spared during the primaries and for that reason she hasn’t had much practice in defending against them. This section of the debate seems likely to serve as a microcosm of the election as a whole: Clinton has experience but also has lousy judgment, while Trump is a shameless opportunist who doesn’t know much except for how to take advantage of his opponents’ poor records.

Hard to disagree with this assessment. Despite all the hype, I anticipate a tense and nervous affair in which both candidates attempt to limit their exposure and avoid any kind of genuine, extemporaneous thinking that may result in a “gaffe”. The winner will be the candidate who avoids going out on a limb.

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6:04PM New York / 11:04PM London

The National Review’s Ian Tuttle is pessimistic about the debate, saying that it cannot possibly reveal anything we don’t already know – that both candidates are terrible:

At 9 p.m. EST tonight, the two major-party presidential candidates will take the stage for the season’s first general-election debate. One candidate is a pathological liar and egomaniac. The other is Donald Trump.

Whether their sparring match will actually matter is an open question. Political scientists are more skeptical than pundits about the influence of presidential debates, several studies having shown that even the most memorable debates occasioned only small polling shifts. Nonetheless, tonight is being billed as a potentially “epic” “battle royale.” The Washington Post suggests that 80 to 100 million people — that is, a quarter or more of the country — could tune in for at least part. That would make the debate not just the most-watched political event in modern American history but quite possibly the largest communal act of masochism in human history.

Tuttle concludes:

In other words, there are no good outcomes to this. It’s a contest to determine which candidate we’d be marginally more chagrined to see devoured by crocodiles, or stricken by plague. There’s the candidate who silences sexual-assault victims, or the candidate who calls women “dogs” and “pigs”; there’s the candidate who hides from the press, or the candidate who wants to sue them; there’s the candidate who “Hispanders,” or the candidate who calls Mexicans “rapists.” Take your pick.

I think he goes too far. While Hillary Clinton is certainly a flawed candidate and no conservative’s obvious choice for president (what with being a Democrat ‘n all), she is a known quantity, and whatever questions may exist about her judgment she at least understands the machinery of government.

Besides, I simply don’t buy the most egregious alarmism about Clinton from the American Right. They say that she is gunning for the Second Amendment. Well, Republicans made exactly the same accusation of President Obama. Each year was supposed to be the year when the Evil Marxist Kenyan would finally reveal his true colours and begin confiscating America’s guns. This whipped-up paranoia manifested itself in higher gun and ammunition sales across America. And yet with only 115 days of his presidency left, he really is waiting until the last minute.

And when conservatives overreach like this for political gain (making Americans fear unnecessarily that the Second Amendment is about to be “abolished”, as though that were possible with this Congress and Supreme Court) it calls into question some of their other more shrill accusations against Hillary Clinton.

So yes, both candidates are bad. But Hillary Clinton’s sins are grey ethics and a lack of vision, while Trump’s are unknown and potentially far worse. Given the choice, is reluctantly endorsing Clinton not the real conservative thing to do?

–

5:45PM New York / 10:45PM London

Why is politics so bitterly partisan yet so emptied out of meaningful, ideological policy discussion? Well, it doesn’t help when the news channels promote a presidential debate as though it were Wrestlemania rather than a serious, sober public event:

In national politics, harsh attacks are to be expected. I certainly don’t fault Trump for calling Hillary Clinton dishonest, or wrongheaded, or possessed of bad judgment, even if it’s a jarring departure from the glowing compliments that he used to pay her.

But even in a realm where the harshest critiques are part of the civic process, Trump crossed a line this week when he declared his intention to invite Gennifer Flowers to today’s presidential debate. What kind of man invites a husband’s former mistress to an event to taunt his wife? Trump managed to launch an attack that couldn’t be less relevant to his opponent’s qualifications or more personally cruel. His campaign and his running-mate later said that it was all a big joke. No matter. Whether in earnest or in jest, Trump showed his tendency to humiliate others.

And concludes:

People disagree about the ideal traits to have in a leader. But almost no one wants a president who has proven himself an addict to being cruel, mean-spirited, and spiteful. For decades, Trump has been deliberately cruel to others, often in the most public ways. He behaves this way flagrantly, showing no sign of shame or reflection.

What kind of person still acts that way at 70? A bad person.

It is that simple.

Giving a cruel man power and expecting that he won’t use it to inflict cruelty is madness. To vote for Trump, knowing all of this, is to knowingly empower cruelty.

Better to recoil in disgust.

Even if every single ethical allegation against Hillary Clinton were definitively proven true, it would do nothing to set at rest this blog’s gnawing unease that Donald Trump either suffers from some undiagnosed personality disorder or is literally just so coarse and brutish that he will humiliate friend and foe alike for his passing amusement.

It’s well-established that Donald Trump’s campaign doesn’t do most of the things a traditional political team does. There’s scarcely any policy, weak fundraising, and no ground game. But in one classic area of political positioning, the Trump team has proven it is historically great at one classic tactic: expectations setting.

With a few hours to go before the first presidential debate, it’s hard to see what the Republican nominee could do to avoid the meeting being judged at least a tie. Through a combination of months of campaigning, leaks about his debate prep, and aggressive working of the referees, Trump has set expectations so low that it’s hard to imagine how he finishes the debate without getting positive reviews from mainstream commentators.

[..] Separately, aides told Politico that Trump’s team has constructed an elaborate psychological profile of Clinton that he’s using to prepare. It’s hard to tell what is a psych-out and what’s real, but the effect of the balance of these leaks is to present Trump as so bumbling that simply standing up straight is an achievement.

We’ve seen all this before, of course. Famously weak debater George W. Bush went to great pains to raise expectations of his opponent John Kerry, with one Bush aide going so far as telling the media – with a straight face – that the rather staid, wooden Kerry was “the best debater since Cicero”. It seems that no hyperbole is too ludicrous when it comes to trying to give your candidate an edge.

While we have had no individual statements or acts of expectation-setting as ridiculous as the Kerry-Cicero comparison, the cumulative effect of the Trump campaign’s expectations-lowering has likely been greater. As the anti-establishment challenger, Trump has been held to a different standard since he first launched his campaign. But now, for the first time, Hillary Clinton’s much-vaunted experience – the “most qualified candidate ever to run for president”, we are continuously, implausibly told – will be a dead weight around her neck.

If Trump can avoid self-immolating and land one or two punches, that may well be enough to count as a “victory” or at least a draw, even if Hillary Clinton wins on points (as she almost certainly will). In other words, being graded on a very generous curve could well be to Donald Trump’s great advantage.

–

5:06PM New York / 10:06PM London

Putting my cards on the table

I’m a small government conservative, but I won’t vote for bold-faced authoritarians or unashamed ignoramuses just because they cloak themselves in the mantle of conservatism. This blog supported Barack Obama over John McCain in 2008, because John McCain fatally compromised his own judgment and principles by choosing Sarah Palin as his running mate and unleashing that force on an undeserving world.

On the same grounds, this blog cannot support Donald Trump, a man who makes George W. Bush’s mockery of fiscal conservatism look like the strictest observance, whose ignorance of policy is matched only by his disregard for the Constitution and whose temperament and character flaws make him a reckless choice in an unstable world.

And this blog believes that it is not enough for fellow conservatives against Trump to quietly sit on the sidelines out of some perverse, unearned loyalty to the Republican nominee. While one has to respect the mandate bestowed by GOP primary voters, that does not mean suppressing dissent or deserved criticism. And while the 2016 presidential election offers a most unpalatable choice, principled conservatives should have the courage to declare their intention to vote for the least worst option, Hillary Clinton.

A Hillary Clinton presidency gives the Republican Party four more years to come up with a more palatable option than John McCain, Mitt Romney and Donald Trump. In those four years, precious little will happen to fill conservative hearts with glee. But it is also highly unlikely that anything cataclysmicly, unfixably awful will happen either. That, to this blog, seems like a much better deal than letting Donald Trump loose on the Oval Office and potentially having him tarnishing the conservative and Republican brands even more than he has been able to as a presidential candidate.

Many of Trump’s desperate apologists try to trip up the #NeverTrump brigade by pouring scorn on the idea that Hillary Clinton is more conservative than Trump (see Ace of Spades’ sarcastic description of Clinton as “the One True Conservative in the race”). This misses the point. Many of us see Hillary Clinton exactly for what she is – namely a very calculating centrist with no core political convictions whatsoever. She was never the swivel-eyed leftist that Newt Gingrich tried to suggest – witness her glacial movement on gay marriage, only cautiously signalling her support once she was sure that Joe Biden and Barack Obama had not done themselves any political damage.

So the question is not one of whether Hillary Clinton is “more” of a conservative than Trump (though Donald Trump certainly is no conservative). The question is one of temperament and basic competence to execute the job. And while Hillary Clinton may be dogged by many legitimate ethical questions, few doubt that she could handle the levers of government, if only to maintain America on its present course.

Donald Trump, by contrast, is a complete unknown quantity, and a hugely volatile one at that. When he goes off-script he is liable to say or do anything (insulting the most sympathetic of characters or getting into Twitter wars with D-list celebrities) which comes to mind, and when he is on-script (as at his recent summit with Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto) he sounds like he has been lobotomised. I have about as much confidence that Donald Trump has read, understood and respects the US Constitution as I believe his claim that “nobody reads the bible more than me“.

The choice, then, is not between a leftist ideologue and an honest, hard-workin’ conservative whose only crime is to be a bit politically incorrect sometimes, as Trump’s loyal cheerleader Sean Hannity loves to put it. The choice is between an ideologically rootless centrist who will likely maintain the status quo because she and her family have too much vested in it to see it fail, or a madman.

So that’s where I stand. This blog is opposed to Donald Trump, though I respect and sympathise with many Americans who are drawn to his candidacy. But that does not make this an ardently pro-Hillary blog – I will continue to call out shortcomings and failures as I see them.

And that’s how I’ll be live-blogging the debate tonight, and covering the remainder of the election in general. With scepticism and no small amount of disillusionment directed at both sides.

–

4:00PM New York / 9:00PM London

Welcome to the Semi-Partisan Politics live blog of the first 2016 presidential debate between Hillary Clinton (Democrat) and Donald Trump (Republican).

For newcomers to this blog, I write from the perspective of a British guy and future American citizen married to a proud Texan girl, currently living in London but ultimately destined to move back to the United States (timing potentially dependent on the outcome of this election!)

I have lived and worked in Chicago and the Mid West, travelled widely throughout America, follow American politics as closely as British, and so feel more than justified in weighing in with my many opinions. Those still in doubt can read my brief bio here, and a more long-winded version here.

EU Referendum Live Blog – Britain Votes For Brexit; The Aftermath

52% is enough to win a referendum, but not enough to make a guaranteed success of Brexit

In closing this live-blog of EU referendum result reaction (and before normal business resumes), I want to close with an email sent from the German office to the London office of a certain multinational company the day that the referendum results were announced.

The email was entitled “You’ll Never Walk Alone”, and reads (with redactions to protect anonymity):

Dear Friends,

On this truly disturbing day, we want to send you our greatest empathy and heartfelt solidarity to London and the whole UK [company] Team. Although troubling times maybe ahead of all of us here in Europe, the whole team of [company] Germany keeps on believing in the European idea and the future of peaceful and prosperous unity for Europe with the United Kingdom and all the wonderful people living there.

So for us this is not the end of the road. Our friendship with you will be stronger than ever and we will get through this together.

Big Hugs from Germany

Please share with the whole office

This text is followed by a picture of the entire German team making heart shapes with their hands as they hold aloft the German, EU and UK flags.

This is what we have to contend with as we try to navigate Brexit and secure a prosperous, independent but interconnected future for Britain outside of the European Union – whole offices full of undeniably smart people who legitimately view the events of the past two weeks as a nearly unspeakable calamity with no redeeming features.

The author of this email (and the senior person who authorised it) clearly had absolutely no doubt that their sentiments would be shared by every single one of their colleagues. There was no recognition that smart, professional people might come down on different sides of the argument on the great question of Britain’s future place in the world. On the contrary, there was only the arrogant but utterly genuine assumption that everybody working for the company (both in Germany and the UK) shares this view. Certainly no Brexit-supporting employee would dare to openly admit their own political views in such a one-sided, hostile climate.

I’m delighted that we won this referendum and finally have the chance to build the positive, enterprising and independent Britain that this blog longs to see. But while 52-48 is a firm victory, it cannot be denied that we have been helped over the line with the support of some retrograde, even unsavoury supporters and ideas, while we convinced too few of the professional class to join with us. It simply should not be the case that the entire staffs of any organisation (save perhaps the EU itself) view Brexit as an unmitigated calamity. That this is currently the case is a failure on the part of Brexiteers – despite the unwavering effort of many of us to present the progressive, internationalist case for leaving the EU.

But what strikes me most in this email is the way that its author describes Brexit – the prospect of Britain regaining the kind of democratic control over its own affairs enjoyed by every other developed country in the world outside Europe – as “truly disturbing”. We currently live in a country where many people are consumers first and conscientious citizens a distant second; where the elimination of the smallest short-term risk is seen as more important than safeguarding the long term democratic health of Britain.

But it is not enough to rail at pro-EU professionals for voting for their own short-term economic self interest, just as it is not enough for disappointed Remainers to berate Brexiteers for supposedly voting against their own. We must go out and convince people, rebuilding the proper respect and reverence for democracy in the hearts and minds of the people. If we fail to do this, it is only a matter of time before we barter our freedoms away again, for some other shiny new trinket.

It is simply not right – and not sustainable – for Britain to be a country where so many urban professionals continue to hold democracy in such low regard (or not even consider it at all). Bright, educated young professionals should be the biggest enemy of an elitist, antidemocratic anachronism like the European Union, not its loudest cheerleaders.

And until that changes, securing our ultimate freedom from the EU and a prosperous new independence will continue to be an unnecessarily punishing, uphill slog.

–

4 July – 11:15

Airbrushing Brexiteer women from history

Brendan O’Neill makes a really good point:

Liberal commentators are always saying “Don’t airbrush women from history!” Yet their moany depiction of Brexit as the handiwork of Boris and Farage utterly erases Gisela Stuart, Andrea Leadsom, Kate Hoey, Women for Britain, Dreda Say Mitchell, and those thousands of Brexiteer nurses and female trade unionists and workers and mums. Seems wiping women from the historic record is cool if those women did something Guardianistas don’t like.

Quite.

–

3 July – 11:25

Pity the young and their lost “European identity”

The New York Times, which distinguised itself with one-sided and incredibly biased coverage catastrophising Brexit at every turn while utterly failing to even consider the democratic case for independence from European political union, is back with a “won’t somebody please think of the children!” lament for Britain’s youth.

There is Erasmus, the European Union program that organizes and subsidizes student exchanges among universities across its 28 countries and elsewhere. There is easyJet, the budget airline that lets them hop between European cities as simply and cheaply as it can be to trek across town. And there is the euro, the currency used in most of the member countries.

Young adults are now grappling with what Britain’s vote to exit the European Union means for their profoundly European way of life. For them, it is perfectly normal to grow up in one country, study in another, work in a third, share a flat with people who have different passports and partner up without regard to nationality.

“It means that we are not going to be sisters and brothers of a big project,” said Antoine Guéry, 24, a Frenchman whose résumé and network of friends provide a crash course in European geography.

“At best, we are going to be allies” — friends, but no longer family. “It feels less like home.”

Waah waah waah. Of course, Erasmus will continue to exist (no doubt with British participation) despipte Brexit. Low-cost airlines will not suddenly disappear in a puff of smoke now that the British people have voted to free themselves from unwanted European political union. And the euro was never a reality for Brits anyway. Yet all of these things are cited in an attempt to catastrophise Brexit, to make it seem as though the granular details of peoples’ lives is going to be irrevocably harmed in some way.

The NYT goes on to cite the sob stories of exactly the kind of people who make up the modern metro-Left, utterly oblivious to the fact that these people in no way represent the majority of the youth (most of whom did not even bother to vote in the EU referendum):

Mr. Guéry works at a public-relations firm in Paris but had been looking for job opportunities in London — an exercise he shelved immediately after the “Brexit” vote on June 23. His degree is from Sciences Po University in Paris, but he also studied at Stockholm University and Germany’s University of Potsdam.

It was in Stockholm that two German women, Carolina Leersch, now 26, and Kim Seele, 28, joined his inner circle. In Berlin, Mr. Guéry lived with Ms. Seele’s aunt, had an Irish boyfriend and befriended Lauren Muscroft, who is British, and Marion Desbles, who is from Rennes, France.

This group and others like it are, to be sure, a subset within a subset, part of a fourth E — the elite — who studied at the Continent’s top institutions and took advantage of the Pan-European doors open to them. Splitting Britain from the European Union may put a damper on future changes important to this globalized generation, like the move toward a single European digital market for movie and music streaming, and the end, by next year, of cellphone roaming charges when crossing European Union borders.

Days before the British referendum, Mr. Guéry, Ms. Muscroft and Ms. Desbles jokingly wondered, while waiting in the passport lines at the airport in Barcelona, Spain, whether Britons like Ms. Muscroft would soon be kicked out of the European Union lane.

The New York Times – and the modern, metro-Left (or “middle class clerisy”, to use the term coined by Brendan O’Neill) for which it is a mouthpiece, simply cannot conceive of a world where not all young people enjoy this upper middle class jetsetting lifestyle. The fact that most young people do not routinely hop on aeroplanes – even easyJet ones – to visit university friends from Norway and Spain simply does not compute.

This is a problem because while it would certainly be great if everybody had the same international career and leisure opportunities that the New York Times apparently thinks is the case, in fact many do not. And hand-wringing about Brexit while completely and utterly ignoring the “minor” question of democracy only provides more evidence that the elite are dramatically out of touch with the wider country, and specifically with the less privileged demographics whose interests they so sanctimoniously claim to care about.

In their haste to catastrophise Brexit by soliciting the tearful opinions of PR professionals and lawyers, the NYT never bothered to interview for their piece a single one of the millions of young people in southern Europe who have been doomed by the EU’s ruinous policies and failing currency union to a life with may now never include the joys of a fulfilling, international career.

Since the Brexit was announced last week, there has been outrage, protests and emotional social media posts a plenty.

But some students claim the UK’s decision to leave the EU has left them in a ‘depression’, adding that they feel like they’re ‘grieving for the loss of cultural enrichment’ that the European Union provided.

‘I’ve felt so down all day because of this, and just have this constant sick feeling in my stomach. I genuinely feel like I’m grieving.

‘I feel like I’m grieving for our growing economy. I’m grieving for our loss of cultural enrichment. If we weren’t a part of the EU I’d never have met people from the likes France, Norway, Germany, who have so much to offer to our country. We have so much to gain from these cultures,’ one person posted on The Student Room.

‘Can I class Brexit as a traumatic event when fail my exams next week? Because honestly I’m so distracted now because of it?’ another chipped in.

One person replied: ‘I relate. I somehow survived an exam while still panicking the whole way through.’

Because of course “cultural enrichment”, foreign travel and cultural exchanges are only possible within the stultifying confines of regional political union…

–

1 July – 00:25

Brexit calculus and the Tory leadership

Dr. Richard North’s cold hard calculus as to which Conservative Party leadership candidate would offer the most promise to small-L liberal Brexiteers of a Flexcit mindset leads in a rather distressing direction:

There is not much to fault with Theresa May’s speech.

[..] Gove was less impressive, offering only “in the next few days” to lay out his plan for the United Kingdom. But behind Gove is the poisonous Dominic Cummings: the two go together. That is not a happy choice.

At least though, we are freed from the possibility of Johnson as Prime Minister. I’ve not made any secret of my dislike for him, a loathsome creature who has made a career out of lying, and fronted a disastrous “leave” campaign which was centred on a lie. We are well rid of him.

In the Vote Leave campaign, however, Gove also supported the lie. On that basis alone, he cannot be trusted to manage our exit negotiations. That he is totally opposed to continued participation in the Single Market, in my view, further rules him out.

Perversely, I think the exit negotiations are probably better off in the hands of a “reformed” remainer such as Theresa May. After all, the final arbiter of the settlement is not the Prime Minister, but Parliament. Let those who spoke for a return of Parliamentary sovereignty now hold Parliament’s feet to the fire, and demand that it does it job of holding the Executive to account – if it can.

And, on that basis, the best candidate for Conservative Leader seems to be Mrs May.

I don’t doubt Dr. North’s logic for a moment, but my goodness – what an exquisitely high price to pay in order to give the interim EFTA/EEA Brexit approach maintaining our present single market access the best shot of success.

While this blog came to detest and deplore David Cameron for his utter lack of conservative principle, Theresa May embodies all of the worst authoritarian and paternalistic instincts of the Conservative Party which repel more liberal conservatarians such as myself.

A Britain led by a Prime Minister Theresa May would be a land where ancient civil liberties, already crumbling, were put in the blender and liquidised once and for all, and where the state – acting in the Common Good, of course – controlled and surveillance ever more of our lives, all the time.

Furthermore, Theresa May is a politician who not only supported Britain’s continued membership of the EU during the referendum but who lacked the political courage (less cynical people might say had the strategic smarts) to take a prominent role in the campaign. On the most important political question to face this country in a generation, the long-serving and highly authoritarian Home Secretary effectively hedged her bets and stayed silent. That may well have been politically smart. But it was also rank cowardice. And this is the person best placed to lead Britain to independence from the EU and prosperity without it?

As I said, I take no issue with Dr. North’s assessment of the Tory leadership situation as it affects Brexit, which is by far and away the most important issue in this blog’s estimation. But personally, I’m not quite there yet. Having always been firmly of the opinion that I would sooner be dead in the cold ground than see a flinty-eyed authoritarian like Theresa May in 10 Downing Street, potentially being forced into a 180 degree U-turn to save the precious Brexit cause is an exquisitely painful price to be paid (to the extent that one holds out desperate hope that an alternative may yet emerge, against the odds).

In fact, at present the only bright spot for this blog in a future Theresa May premiership would be watching the preening, virtue-signalling Social Justice Warriors of Britain short-circuit themselves trying to hate on May despite the fact that she is a woman (though surely a self-hating one, according to the current intersectional feminist school of thought).

But the prospect of these delicious moments of humour does not make up for the lasting damage a Prime Minister Theresa May could feasibly do to our country, constitutional settlement and civil liberties, not to mention the already-sullied Conservative Party brand.

–

1 July – 00:05

RIP Labour

My Conservatives for Liberty colleague Martin Bailey hits the nail on the head with his diagnosis of the multiple personalities currently occupying the Labour Party host.

Commentators are talking about the existence of two Labour Parties– On one side the soft left Centrists, the Blairites, the Gaitskellites, the social democrats and on the other the hard left, the Corbynites, the Trots, the Bevanites, the socialists. The accepted narrative casts these two tribes as locked in a permanent battle for the soul of the party, creating a natural equilibrium, ying and yang. This is no longer the case. There is now a third Labour party.

The third Labour party is the largest of all. It exists not in the drawing rooms of effete London suburbs but in warehouses and Wetherspoons across the land. They care not a jot for ideology or dogma or political correctness or Palestine and have voted Labour out of resentment of the establishment, class prejudice and the belief that it was the best way to protect their marginalised communities.

The working class have supported the Labour party in their millions for nearly a hundred years, a political identity passed down through generations, but they are starting to realise that neither the Blairites nor the Corbynistas articulate their views and are in fact happy to dismiss them as ignorant racists.

The disconnect between Labour’s professional political class and the traditional Labour voter was the real talking point of the referendum. Who can blame the common people for giving a great big two fingers to those who have taken them for granted for so long? Once again the Labour party has learnt nothing, with contempt for the working class reaching new heights in the aftermath of the vote with Guardian columnists writing about ‘Crappy’ Northern towns and David Lammy calling for parliament to ignore the democratic will of the nation.

Lammy’s position is as understandable as it is indicative of the status quo. A London MP who sees the coming typhoon and in an attempt to save his own behind at the next election decides to voice the concerns of the delicate snowflakes of the big smoke, without any thought of the repercussions his words will have in places like Rotherham, Blackburn or Burnley.

UKIP has become the lightning rod for working class anger and malcontent and thanks to Labour’s continuing, indeed increasing, inclination to treat the people as an irrational, immature inconvenience, a party that should have been declared obsolete post-Brexit looks likely to go from strength to strength.

This chimes exactly with my own thinking. Listening to the howls of outrage from centrist, metro-left MPs anguished at being “dragged out of Europe” against their will – the very thing that many of Labour’s traditional working class voters were celebrating – has been an instructive real-time case study of the death of a major political party.

So where does this leave Labour? Bailey rightly points out that any SDP-style split of the centrists would only result in “a party without an electorate, a cart without a horse”. Yet if the centrists stay and succeed in forcing Jeremy Corbyn out, the floor will fall out from under the party with no commensurate benefit – the Momentum wing, enraged, would simply sabotage the party, even costing Labour safe seats by running as a new party.

It’s almost enough to make one feel sorry for Labour. But then one recalls their cynical hysteria in painting the slightest hint of fiscal conservatism as an ideologically motivated attack on the poor and vulnerable, and any feelings of sympathy quickly disappear.

–

30 June – 16:10

The blowback against democracy continues

Garvan Walshe is the latest voice to express his fear and hatred of democracy now that it has dealt up an outcome with which he happens to profoundly disagree.

Writing in Conservative Home, Walshe frets that “democratic fundamentalism is now the most serious threat to freedom in the West”:

Like all fundamentalisms, democratic extremism takes a noble idea, that everyone’s political views should count equally, too far. But if democracy is to endure, voters must inform themselves of the facts, avoid being swayed by prejudice and emotion, and to base judgements on evidence. The romantic invocation of popular sovereignty is no substitute for calm deliberation.

It is not reasonable however for a political elite simply to tell voters they are wrong. The people have every reason to distrust it on the very issue that motivated them to vote to leave: immigration. For more than a decade voters have been told that immigration could be controlled with ease, even though the kind of control they want can only come at enormous economic cost, and by running the risk of stirring up xenophobic feeling across the country. The elite’s greatest error wasn’t, as is often said, to ignore their concerns: but to pretend to address them while doing nothing. Was it asking too much of our political system to try and explain why they were misplaced, and address the real problems that have for the past fifteen years falsely been blamed on immigration?

The remain campaign’s predictions, however disbelieved, are coming true. The pound has had its steepest fall in 30 years. Banks and housebuilders have lost up to a third of their value. $2 trillion was wiped of global stock markets on the day after the vote. Scotland is poised to break away. The mythical “better deal” where greater immigration restrictions could be won without losing access to the single market was immediately rejected by Angela Merkel.

On June 23rd the people voted to take a huge gamble on the outcome of the Brexit negotiations leaves the next Prime Minister trapped. He or she can either sacrifice the interests of leave voters by throwing aside 40 years of business relationships with our largest trading partner, or betray their beliefs by concluding a Norway-style deal that has us formally leave the EU, but maintains economic arrangements more or less unchanged. If they get it wrong, Scotland will secede and UKIP’s rank racism will be almost impossible to stop.

What can one say in response to this preening, hysterical reaction to Brexit? It goes without saying that Garvan Walshe would have no qualms whatsoever if the “tyranny of the majority” had kept Britain in the EU with a 52-48 endorsement of the 40 year status quo. Only when the wrong people with the wrong opinions have heir moment does Walshe shriek like a Victorian prude and reach for the smelling salts.

Walshe is sneeringly dismissive of democracy as a dangerous thing by which the unwashed masses might make the “wrong” choice based on emotion, and presumptuous about the motives of Brexiteers (assuming that they were primarily motivated by immigration concerns when the recent post-referendum ComRes poll showed that democracy was the key issue).

This argument lays bare the arrogance of the Remainers-in-denial. Even now, when their dream of Britain as a subjugated vassal of an ever-integrating European proto- state has been rejected by the electorate, their minds cannot fathom the loss. Instead, the Brexiteers’ victory must be chalked up to “insufficient information” made available to the electorate, while the biggest exercise in British democracy in decades is seen as something to be feared rather than celebrated.

The battle does not end with the EU referendum. People like Garvan Walshe, who believe that the people are incapable of understanding the big issues which affect their lives, and that our job is to be condescended to and have things framed and explained to us by an all-knowing elite technocracy, are lurking under every rock.

And we must fight them every inch of the way if we are to make a success of Brexit.

New Zealand has offered its top trade negotiators to the United Kingdom, relieving the British civil service as it prepares for the strain of seeking new deals with countries across the globe.

The Telegraph understands that the Commonwealth country has made an offer to loan staff to the British civil service, which has few trade negotiators of its own.

Wellington’s olive branch came alongside an offer to discuss a trade agreement with the UK, which would help Britain get out of the starting blocks and begin replacing the trade access lost as a result of the Brexit vote.

[..] Murray McCully, New Zealand’s foreign minister, confirmed to the New Zealand Herald that he had had a discussion with Jonathan Sinclair, Britain’s High Commissioner to New Zealand, on Monday.

We’ve simply made an offer that we as a country that is a long-standing friend … stands ready to be useful in any way we can be,” Mr McCully said. The foreign minister did not rule out providing the UK with the expertise of its trade negotiators.

So much for backward, isolationist Britain standing alone in the world.

In seriousness, though, this is exactly the kind of gesture which we would want to see from our friends and allies at this time. After 40 years of slow submersion into the EU’s political union, Britain’s own skills and competencies in key areas like trade have atrophied with time.

The plus side of the interim EFTA/EEA approach advocated by the Flexcit plan, not mentioned in the Telegraph article, is that trading with the single market through EFTA would significantly reduce the volume of trade agreements which urgently need to be negotiated in the first place, meaning that any seconded staff from other countries could even be put to use helping Britain to chart a longer term course beyond the EEA. And as an added bonus, rejoining EFTA would immediately make Britain a party to the tens of existing trade deals which that trade bloc has negotiated with other countries.

–

30 June – 15:00

Centrist Labour waves goodbye to reality

Luke Akehurst, writing in LabourList, entertains dreams (echoed by many in the party establishment) of a grand centrist coalition wresting control of the party back from the Corbynites.

Now more than ever Britain needs the Labour values which were notable only by their absence in the referendum campaign.

Now more than ever Labour needs a new leader who can stand up for those values in Parliament, in negotiations with the EU and the remaining 27 member states, and in Downing Street after the coming election.

And now more than ever we need mainstream Labour supporters to sign up as party members, stand up for their values and elect a new Leader.

Anyone who is devastated by the referendum result and wants to take a step back on the road to serious, progressive politics should now join the Labour Party.

A leadership election is looming and, while Jeremy Corbyn has lost a lot of support among party members in the last few months, we need more to join us if we are to elect a mainstream, credible Leader.

If there is a contested leadership ballot we need to counteract the mass recruitment of Corbyn supporters that happened last year not just by persuading the wing of his previous voters who have been alienated by incompetence, sectarianism, failure to make electoral headway and what increasingly looks like the deliberate sabotage of the Labour In campaign to switch, but also by recruiting hundreds of thousands of new members and supporters ourselves.

All that energy and desire for change in our politics apparent from the referendum campaign and the reaction to it needs to be channelled into a concerted membership drive across every town and city in our country.

Labour is the party of the many, not the few.

And now is our chance to show that the mainstream are many and the far left are few.

The only problem is that vague, wishy-washy people beloved by pandering centrist politicians are by their very nature the hardest to tempt off their sofas to vote, let alone getting them to stump up £50 a year to join a political party and remember to vote in its leadership election.

The plain truth is this: the Labour Party is now reaping what it sowed during its opportunistic period of opposition from 2010 under Ed Miliband. Faced with an utterly bland, centrist and inoffensive not-very-conservative government – in actuality nothing more than Tony Blair’s fourth term only with less money to spend – the Labour Party decided that their quick route back to power lay in portraying the smallest acts of fiscal responsibility and spending restraint as “Thatcherism on steroids”, and sensible reforms to welfare as a deliberate war on the poor, the sick and the disabled.

Unable to run on their own record, which saw Britain uniquely ill-equipped among rich nations to weather the financial crisis, Labour MPs (and they are nearly all guilty) instead pretended that David Cameron was Genghis Khan and that Iain Duncan Smith wanted to reopen the work houses.

Having egged on their own supporters and activists in this way, it is hardly surprising that following Ed Miliband’s departure a large number of them became receptive to a leadership candidate who promised to end the “crippling austerity” gripping the nation, even if this austerity mostly existed only in their own heads.

And now the same bland, centrist, careerist labour MPs who screamed “Tory genocide of the sick!” in a tawdry attempt to drum up votes are now throwing their toys out of the pram because they find themselves led by a man whose far-left politics were deemed by the party membership to be the best antidote to the very phantoms which the Labour parliamentary caucus themselves encouraged. Quite frankly, it’s pathetic.

The Labour Party membership overwhelmingly voted for Jeremy Corbyn to be their leader. One year later, if the majority of Labour MPs don’t like this fact it is for them to find a new party (and new supporters), not to subvert the will of their own members and activists.

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29 June – 14:40

Nicola Sturgeon put back in her box

The Telegraph hearteningly reports that EU leaders are spurning self-important Nicola Sturgeon’s attempts to negotiate her own deal for Scotland with Brussels, separate and in contradiction to the UK government’s own negotiations:

Nicola Sturgeon will now meet Jean-Claude Juncker during her visit to Brussels today to discuss Scotland keeping its EU status but she suffered another major blow after receiving short shrift from Germany.

The pair were not originally expected to meet thanks to Mr Juncker’s full diary but talks have been scheduled for this evening.

She is also meeting Martin Shulz, president of the European Parliament but Donald Tusk, the president of the powerful European Council comprising the heads of member states, has refused an invitation for talks.

It also emerged today that a series of member state governments have indicated they will not hold direct talks with the SNP about protecting Scotland’s status in the EU.

The German government told the Glasgow Herald this was an “internal” British issue and declined to comment further when asked if it would engage directly with the Scottish Government.

Denmark said its minister for foreign affairs “will not intervene in the internal UK discussions following the referendum last week”. The Czech government said it was “premature to address the question of an independent Scotland and its relation to the EU.”

The Estonian Foreign Affairs Ministry did not wish to engage in “speculation” but its Slovakian counterpart opened the door to bilateral talks, saying its appreciated Scotland’s pro-EU attitude.

Good. This is right and proper – any other response from our European allies would have constituted a major diplomatic incident and breach of protocol. It is not for other sovereign nations to undertake subversive negotiations with any one province or state of an allied nation, particularly when the putative negotiating partner is operating so far beyond her own remit and authority as First Minister of Scotland.

Nearly all domestic matters are now (rightly) devolved to the Scottish government, and the SNP should concentrate on making less of a hash of those areas already under its control before wading into foreign policy areas which it would have no right to participate in even under an ideal federal UK model.

Perhaps this is a sign of the Foreign Office – so tremulously ineffective under the weak leadership of Philip Hammond – finally reasserting itself and insisting that our European allies play it straight. Or perhaps they are all doing the right thing unbidden, with only EU leaders (excluding Donald Tusk) and not heads of government giving Nicola Sturgeon five minutes of their time.

And so it should be. Were the positions reversed, it would be unthinkable for a British government to enter into parallel talks with separatist parties or assembly leaders in, say, Spain, if Basque or Catalan leaders wanted Britain to pull strings allowing them to remain in the EU if Spain as a whole seceded. This would represent an unwarranted interference in another country’s domestic affairs, which is why no matter how much Scottish MEPs preen and posture and win applause in the European Parliament, they will rightly gain zero meaningful support from the chancelleries of Europe.

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29 June – 08:00

Molly Scott Cato, writing in Left Foot Forward, exemplifies the sanctimonious metro-left’s sheer incomprehension that 17 million Britons, including many working class voters, could possibly have voted against what Cato and her peers arrogantly deem (without any consultation) to be their best interests.

I think it may have been the novelty of their vote counting that confused the ‘Regrexiteers’; they regarded their little cross as a gesture and then were horrified when they discovered that they had changed history.

Despite there being no evidence that a significant number of Brexiteers regret their vote (save the smattering of examples gratefully and desperately seized on by a terrified pro-EU media), Cato picks up this idea and runs with it.

Just how morally and intellectually superior does one have to consider oneself to be in order to decide that everybody else – a clear majority of the country – didn’t understand the question put to them in this EU referendum, asking whether we wanted to leave or remain in the EU? Sadly, such Olympian levels of unearned superiority are to be found across whole swathes of the British Left, who having lost all meaningful connection with and understanding of their traditional working class base now seek to justify the gulf of opinion by psychologising working class thought.

Cato continues:

The faux rebellion narrative of the Brexiteers has succeeded.

They have managed to persuade a majority of the British people to support them against their own interests and the advice of every breathing expert.

Tory Brexiteers managed to exploit the hostility felt towards politicians – something they themselves have engendered – and presented voting Leave as an act of rebellion.

During the campaign I was reminded of Yeats’s poem The Second Coming when he says that ‘the best lack all conviction, while the worst; Are full of passionate intensity’.

Although the content of the arguments of those arguing for a withdrawal from our own continent was nonsense and their statistics largely bogus, their passion for their cause was compelling.

Here we see every other desperate left-wing evasion deployed throughout the EU referendum campaign, now repackaged to explain the Remain campaign’s defeat. First, the repeat of John McDonnell’s insidious line “Tory Brexit”, trying to paint the decision on Britain’s place in the EU as a partisan affair supported only by the Evil Tories – a direct contradiction of Cato’s later admission that “people on the right and the left voted for Brexit and it implies nothing in terms of domestic politics.”

And then Cato talks explicitly and hysterically of “withdrawing from our own continent”, as though by leaving a dysfunctional and ever-more tightly integrating political union which no longer works for us we are somehow literally cutting ourselves off from the continent and suspending diplomatic relations with our close friends and allies in Europe.

In their rage at being overruled by the working classes whose support they take for granted and whom they fatuously claim to represent while doing no such thing, the coddled metro-left are making themselves look utterly ridiculous.

But these paroxysms of rage directed at their own supposed base (and the Evil Tories who led the simple, uneducated working classes astray) – in this case offered up by Molly Scott Cato, a decadent Green Party MEP – only serve to reveal the festering black hole where the heart of left-wing politics once beat.

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28 June – 23:10

Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone magazine has a great rebuttal to the increasing number of pundits arguing that Britain’s vote to leave the EU is a symptom of “too much democracy”:

Were I British, I’d probably have voted to Remain. But it’s not hard to understand being pissed off at being subject to unaccountable bureaucrats in Brussels. Nor is it hard to imagine the post-Brexit backlash confirming every suspicion you might have about the people who run the EU.

Imagine having pundits and professors suggest you should have your voting rights curtailed because you voted Leave. Now imagine these same people are calling voters like you “children” and castigating you for being insufficiently appreciative of, say, the joys of submitting to a European Supreme Court that claims primacy over the Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights.

The overall message in every case is the same: Let us handle things.

But whatever, let’s assume that the Brexit voters, like Trump voters, are wrong, ignorant, dangerous and unjustified.

Even stipulating to that, the reaction to both Brexit and Trump reveals a problem potentially more serious than either Brexit or the Trump campaign. It’s become perilously fashionable all over the Western world to reach for non-democratic solutions whenever society drifts in a direction people don’t like. Here in America the problem is snowballing on both the right and the left.

Whether it’s Andrew Sullivan calling for Republican insiders to rig the nomination process to derail Trump’s candidacy, or Democratic Party lifers like Peter Orszag arguing that Republican intransigence in Congress means we should turn more power over to “depoliticized commissions,” the instinct to act by diktat surfaces quite a lot these days.

Taibbi concludes:

If you think there’s ever such a thing as “too much democracy,” you probably never believed in it in the first place. And even low-information voters can sense it.

It is hard to describe just how strongly anti-democratic sentiment is coursing through social media at the present time. This gem came from the timeline of a friend:

Here’s an idea. For our next referendum, let’s settle the question of the correct interpretation of quantum mechanics. Maybe make up for the shortfall in science funding #askamoron

The sneering, snide attitude toward Brexiteers is not going anywhere. Nor is the furious refusal to look at the EU referendum as a question of democracy, but rather as a purely short-term economic question from which the public should take their lead from self-described “experts”. Of course, as Taibbi argues in his Rolling Stone piece, the experts from ancient times, including Plato, were far from agreement themselves as to the meaning and worth of democracy.

Fortunately, while we must do without Plato, we do at least have an abundance of self-righteous, sneering millenials, all furious that their ‘”futures” have somehow been ripped away, and all convinced that democracy is not worth a damn if it means other people (especially the ignorant working classes and selfish older people) having a voice.

Pro-Europeans must learn to see the virtue in retreat. Spurred by the 48 per cent of voters on their side and the British impulse to make the best of things, they want to influence whatever settlement emerges between their country and Europe in the coming years. Conservative Remainers such as Theresa May, the home secretary, still have ambitions to lead their party. The Remain campaign aspires to live on as the liberal conscience of the more probable next prime minister — Boris Johnson — by encouraging his openness to markets and migration against more nativist competitors for his ear.

This is all very plucky, but so is turning up to work after you have been sacked. The British people have instructed their rulers to leave the EU. The execution of their will is the work of years and soul-sapping detail. It cannot be done by a prime minister who believes the instruction was foolish in the first place. It is awkward enough that the technical process of extrication will be managed by reluctant, deflated civil servants.

As a point of democratic principle, the highest offices in government — prime minister, chancellor of the exchequer and foreign secretary — should now go to committed Leavers, preferably ones with compatible accounts of what Leave should mean. A government of all persuasions would be magnanimity for its own sake and a perversion of the referendum result.

None of this is pleasing to say as a Remainer but it is no less true for that. Imagine our reaction if, having lost the referendum by a four-point margin, the other side invoked their hefty vote share to justify a prominent perch in the making of European policy with a view to loosening the terms of membership.

Democracy, like sport, is governed by a cruel clarity. Forty-eight per cent of votes does not entitle pro-Europeans to 48 per cent of their manifesto or 48 per cent of major ministries. Victory and defeat are more absolute than that, and not out of some misplaced machismo. It is for the sake of accountability that winners take all in our system.

That accountability is now everything. Leavers have won what was essentially a referendum and a general election all in one. They must be responsible for the country in the coming years. The economy, the union and the commitments made during the referendum campaign are all theirs to safeguard. A European settlement that simultaneously satisfies Brussels and the 52 per cent is theirs to negotiate.

All very admirable, but I dispute the idea that everything must now be in the hands of the Leavers – particularly if this is taken to mean only Vote Leave apparatchiks, who by no means represent the full depth and spectrum of Brexiteer opinion. This EU referendum was emphatically not a general election. The question before the British people was whether or not we should leave the European Union, and that is the question which was answered. To claim that it was a mandate for anything else is disingenuous. We did not elect a Vote Leave government with our referendum choice, and Brexiteers’ collective support for leaving the EU does not mean that we wish to see a prime minister Boris Johnson – in this blog’s case, emphatically not.

And so while the instruction given by the voters to leave the EU must absolutely be respected, this does not mean that Remainers should automatically be shut out of government. In fact, if the Brexit approach is to proceed along the liberal lines that we hope for, harnessing the desire of Remainers to maintain our preferential access to the single market will be important for building political support for the approaches outlined in Flexcit.

But more than that, Brexit requires the best of all Britons, including those who supported the Remain campaign. Taking their toys and walking away from active participation in the political process as an act of retaliation for having been “taken out of Europe against my will” (to quote the oft-heard whine on social media) is childish in the extreme. Now is not the time for disappointed Remainers to sit back with their arms crossed, hoping for the Leave campaign’s worst elements to fail. That is no kind of citizenship.

Nonetheless, the tone of Janan Ganesh’s piece is to be welcomed. The FT lobbied hard and shamelessly for a Remain vote, making their newspaper virtually unreadable in the process. Perhaps this will mark the start of a renewal.

Perhaps in addition to his gracious words in today’s FT, Ganesh would also now like to retract his assertion that Britain no longer makes history, in light of recent events?

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28 June – 10:55

“The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.” – President Abraham Lincoln, annual message to Congress, December 1862

I am not the only one to be having a post-referendum wobble looking at what we have unleashed. But mostly the shockwave is psychological. We are waking up to the enormity of what we have decided. It’s bigger than even I thought.

But what drives that fear is what my good friend and compatriot Sam Hooper calls “catastrophisation”. Many on the remain side are now in apoplexy going full tilt to find any scrap of evidence that supports their dire warnings. It’s pervasive and quite persuasive. They do it because they believe there is, by so doing, a chance of overturning the result.

But we should hold our nerve. We should not cave into second thoughts. What is done is done. If we go back on our decision now and go crawling back we will be treated in the same way as a battered wife who goes back to her abusive husband, begging for forgiveness.

For a moment in time on Thursday, to abuse a cliche, middle England roared with pride at who we are and what we can do. We should hold on to that. If we give way to doubt then we shall be all the more diminished and in a worse position than before. I urge you to continue to trust in you voting instincts, that we prosper because of who we are, not because of the EU.

I freely admit to having had some of the same initial uncertainties the moment it became clear that we were about to win – not least because victory was so unexpected (and I chasten myself for some of my earlier pessimism). When the gravity of what Britain had decided first hit, it was both awe-inspiring and sobering. It is fair to say that Britain has not made as consequential decision as this in a generation, and this one was made not by professional politicians but by the people.

Now, of course, all hell has broken loose. The turmoil in the Conservative Party, the Labour Party and the markets was inevitable and hardly surprising, particularly since the doggedly pro-EU British government had spent months pumping out cataclysmic warnings about how the world would end if Britain leaves the EU. This will settle down, particularly once nervous speculators and jittery investors realise that Britain’s economic fundamentals did not suddenly change in the early hours of 24 June.

But developments are moving quickly now, and thinking Brexiteers must be nimble and quick to shoot down threats to the safe, staged and liberal approach to Brexit that we want. First and foremost, that means defending the referendum result against the kind of people (like Labour MP David Lammy) who would overturn the result entirely, claiming essentially that the British people were not in their right minds when we voted to leave the EU.

But future threats are also coming thick and fast. Now we must also be on guard to defend against calls for a second referendum, a souped-up form of “associate membership” of the EU, attempts to end Britain’s current preferential access to the single market or the puffed-up, self-important posturing of Nicola Sturgeon and the denialist Scottish nationalists.

It is heartening that EFTA itself has signalled that it would welcome Britain back as a member, thus allowing us to trade with the single market through EFTA’s EEA agreement. Given the close run vote nationwide, it should not be beyond the wit of even our politicians to promote this as a solid compromise which acknowledges Remain’s victory by taking us out of the EU and political union, while nodding to Remainer concerns by maintaining our single market access and at least nominal free movement of people.

Will any of this be easy? No, of course not. Things worth doing – things that might unleash radically greater freedom or prosperity – are never easy. A vote for Brexit was a vote for hard work, because we will no longer have the EU’s safety net to limit our choices and insultate us from their consequences, at the expense of our democracy. For Brexit to succeed, it is fair to say that we must all become better, more informed and engaged citizens. Having taken the first step toward clawing back power from Brussels it is not acceptable for us to now lazily leave all of those powers resting with the same Westminster MPs who readily gave them away in the first place.

So brace yourselves for more hard work. Achieving the best outcome from Brexit may prove to be every bit as difficult as winning the EU referendum. But there should be no doubt that it is possible.

We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.

As a country, we in Britain have not attempted anything remotely as inspiring or consequential as sending a man to the moon in the living memory of most Britons. Standing alone against fascism in the 1940s or (some would say) creating the NHS stand as obvious, depressingly dated examples. But now we choose to plot a path as an independent, democratic nation, and reject our current status as a vassal of a deliberately and profoundly antidemocratic EU.

After forty years of slow but steady political integration with the institutions of Brussels and Strasbourg, this will be difficult. Long-ago atrophied skills and competencies will need to be rebuilt at all layers of our government, while the case for democratic (and constitutional) reform in Britain must press ahead if we are to receive the full Brexit dividend.

On September 12 1962, with his country badly losing the space race to the Soviet Union, President John F Kennedy set his country an almost unimaginably ambitious goal. To quote another American president, he “dare[d] mighty things”. And by the end of that decade, the boot prints of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were stamped into the moon dust.

These days, our ideologically bankrupt politicians do not set us even the smallest of challenges or seek to inspire us to new heights of achievement, preferring to bribe us with promises of an easy life and more, better public services, always paid for by someone else. So since our politicians no longer dare to challenge us, now is the time for the people to challenge our politicians to set their sights higher. And that is precisely what we have done with this vote to leave the unloved, undemocratic and fraying European Union.

The occasion is piled high with difficulty – but also with promise – and we must all rise with the occasion.

Updates will be patchier than usual until next week when full normal business will resume. In the meantime, this thread will remain live as a place for semi-partisan analysis of fast moving developments.

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